JUNE 2006 SUMMER ISSUE

INSIDE Urbanization and Cultural Memory: The 2005 Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture in Shenzhen Cultural Memory: An International Symposium

Artist Features: Tang Maohong, Michael Cherney, Qin Yufen, Hong Hao, Shi Jinsong, Robert Majzels

Reviews: Yang Fudong at Parasol unit Through Popular Expression at International Project Space

Response to Hong Kong Feature: No “Local” is an Island

US$12.00 NT$350.00 US$10.00 NT$350.00

co ɴ t e ɴ ts

2 Editor’s Note

4 Contributors

u ʀ ʙ a ɴ ɪ z atɪoɴ aɴd c u ʟt u ʀ aʟ memoʀʏ p. 8 6 How to Urbanize a Special Economic Zone? The 2005 Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture in Shenzhen Eduard Koegel

13 The Authority of Beauty Sze Tsung Leong

17 Cultural Memory: An International Symposium Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker

20 Fragmented Memory and Energy: Chinese Contemporary Art and Its Multiple Layers of Ideology p. 14 Carol (Yinghua) Lu

ɪ ɴ t e ʀv ɪ ew 28 “I’m a Lazy Person”: Interview with Tang Maohong Biljana Ciric

a ʀt ɪ st feat u ʀ e s 37 Thin Slices: Michael Cherney’s Images of China Hui-shu Lee

44 One Person’s Classics of Mountain and Sea: p. 41 On Qin Yufen and Her Installation Art Bingyi Huang

53 Knowledge and Illusion: On Hong Hao’s Recent Works Christina Yü

59 Shi Jinsong: Na Zha Baby Boutique John Tancock

65 Spinning Chinese Characters, Hebrew Letters, and Plain English: Robert Majzels’s 85 Project Claire Huot p. 62 ʀ ev ɪ ews 75 No Snow on the Broken Bridge: Film and Video Installations by Yang Fudong Adele Tan

81 Through Popular Expression, International Project Space, Birmingham, U.K. Sally Lai

ʀ e s poɴse to ʜoɴɢ koɴɢ feat u ʀ e 85 No “Local” is an Island Jaspar K. W. Lau

93 Chinese Name Index p. 78 EDITOR’S NOTE Y I S H U : Jo u rna l of Con tem pora ry Chinese Art Volume 5, Number 2, June 2006 At times Yishu presents special features, and at p ʀ e s ɪ d e ɴ t Katy Hsiu-chih Chien fouɴdɪɴɢ edɪtoʀ Ken Lum other times it hosts a mix of texts. This is part of its beauty and its spirited unpredictability. Yishu e d ɪ t o ʀ Keith Wallace maɴaɢɪɴɢ edɪtoʀ Zheng Shengtian 17 is certainly eclectic and contains a wide assocɪate edɪtoʀs Julie Grundvig variety of articles and artists, yet they are not Kate Steinmann pʀoject cooʀdɪɴatoʀ Larisa Broyde unrelated to each other. The Shenzhen Biennale adveʀtɪsɪɴɢ maɴaɢeʀ Joyce Lin ɪ ɴ t e ʀ ɴ Chunyee Li of Architecture and the symposium titled Cultural

Memory held at the House of World Cultures in edɪtoʀɪaʟ ʙoaʀd Judy Andrews, Ohio State University Berlin, while they are separate events taking John Clark, University of Sydney place in different countries and tackling different Lynne Cooke, Dia Art Foundation Okwui Enwezor, San Francisco Art Institute thematics, are nevertheless connected in their Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar & Curator Fan Di'an, National Art Museum of China endeavour to generate analyses of the formidable Fei Dawei, Guy & Mariam Ullens Foundation Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh social, economic, and cultural transformation Hou Hanru, San Francisco Art institute Katie Hill, University of Westminster that is taking place in China today, both physically Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic & Historian Sebastian Lopez, Daros-Latinamerica AG and psychologically. Lu Jie, Independent Curator Charles Merewether, Australian National University Ni Tsaichin, Tunghai University Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand Along with the six features on artists as well as Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic & Curator Wu Hung, University of Chicago reviews of two exhibitions that recently took p u ʙ ʟ ɪ s ʜ e ʀ Art & Collection Group Ltd. place in Great Britain, this issues closes with a desɪɢɴ aɴd pʀoductɪoɴ Leap Creative Group response to the feature on Hong Kong in our last cʀeatɪve dɪʀectoʀ Raymond Mah issue. Jaspar K. W. Lau has provided commentary aʀt dɪʀectoʀ Gavin Chow desɪɢɴeʀ Jeremy Lee reflecting his own perspective on each of the ɪt coɴsuʟtaɴt relaITconsulting, Vancouver articles in that feature; these kinds of responses p ʀ ɪ ɴ t ɪ ɴ ɢ Chong-yuan Image Ltd., Taipei are welcomed, since they serve to create a ɪssɴ 1683-3082 forum for dialogue in Yishu. Yishu is published quarterly in Taipei, Taiwan and edited in Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates of Yishu are 5th of March, June, September and December. Speaking of dialogue, Yishu has been invited to Editorial inquiries and manuscripts may be sent to the Editorial Office: participate in the documenta 12 magazines Yishu 410-650 West Georgia Street, Vancouver, BC project. This project involves seventy publications Canada V6B 4N8 Phone: 1 . 6 0 4 . 6 4 9 . 8 1 8 7; Fax: 1 . 6 0 4 . 5 9 1 . 6 3 9 2 from around the globe and focuses on three key E-mail: [email protected] [email protected] questions: Is Modernity our Antiquity? What is Subscription inquiries may be sent to either the Vancouver address Bare Life? and What is to be Done (Education)? or to Hawai’i: Rather than attempting to address all three topics, Journals Department University of Hawai’i Press Yishu will be exploring aspects of education and 2840 Kolowalu Street, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA Phone: 1 . 8 0 8 . 9 5 6 . 8 8 3 3; Fax: 1 . 8 0 8 . 9 8 8 . 6 0 5 2 devoting a section of its next three issues to this E-mail: [email protected] subject. With the aforementioned changes taking The University of Hawai’i Press accepts payment by Visa or Mastercard, cheque, or money order (in U.S. dollars). place in China, Yishu will attempt to address the Advertising inquiries may be sent to either Vancouver address question of what the role of education is now or Taiwan: Art & Collection Ltd. for both artists and the public. We welcome 6F. No.85, Section 1, Chungshan N. Road, Taipei, Taiwan 104 Phone: (886) 2 . 2 5 6 0 . 2 2 2 0; Fax: (886) 2 . 2 5 4 2 . 0 6 3 1 submissions on this topic—from teachers, E-mail: [email protected] students, artists, docents, and so on—and we w w w. y i s hu j o u r n a l . com hope that writers will take the opportunity to No part of this journal may be published without the written permission from the publisher. respond to texts as they appear in these next Subscription rates: one year: US $48; two years: US $86 three issues. Subscription form may be downloaded from our Website We thank Mr. Milton Wong, Mr. Daoping Bao, and Paystone Technologies Corp., for their generous support. Keith Wallace C ov e r : Qin Yu f e n , 100 Meters, i n s t a l l a t i o n , 1994. Courtesy of the artist.

2 co ɴ t ʀ ɪ ʙu to ʀ s

B I L JA NA CIRIC has an M.A. from East China Normal University Shanghai. She is Director of the Shanghai Duolun Musem of Modern Art’s Curatorial Department, Net-Working Curator (China) for the Singapore Biennale 2006, and a regular writer for Art China magazine.

JO-ANNE BIRNIE DA N Z K E R has been Director of the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich since 1992. She has curated numerous exhibitions on both contemporary and historical art, with a special emphasis on the history of the Modern. In 2004–2005 she was Curator of Shanghai Modern (with Ken Lum and Zheng Shengtian), and, in 2005–2006, Curator of Art of Tomorrow: Hilla von Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim (with Karole Vail and Brigitte Salmen).

CLAIRE HUOT is an independent researcher on China. Formerly she was a tenured professor at Université de Montréal and later served as Canada's Cultural Counsellor in China. She has written several articles and two books on contemporary Chinese culture.

BINGYI HUA N G is Assistant Professor of art history at the State University of New York— University at Buffalo. She earned her Ph.D. in art history from Yale University. Her interests include Chinese archaeology as well as contemporary Chinese art and cinema. She has curated various exhibitions in the U. S. and China and was Assistant Curator for Film with the exhibition The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art.

E D UARD KO E G E L is director of the Agency for Urban Development in Berlin with a strong focus on research on Chinese architectural and urban development. From 1999 to 2004 he was Assistant Professor at the Technical University of Darmstadt in the Department for Planning and Architecture in Non-European Regions. As a curator he has organized two exhibitions on contemporary architecture in China and published many papers and several books on current developments.

S A L LY LA I is a fellow of the Clore Leadership Programme, London, and was until recently curator at the Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester. She is also currently acting as Visual Arts Adviser to the Scottish Arts Council. Lai has an M.A. in curating from Goldsmiths College, University of London. She has worked extensively as a curator and has written and spoken on topics in Chinese contemporary visual culture, including land and identity in Hong Kong art and resistance to definition in British Chinese art.

JA S PAR K. W. LAU is a curator and writer. He has also served as editor for several books, including Local Accent: 12 Artists from Hong Kong (Para/Site, 2003) and a monograph on Wu Shanzhuan(Asia Art Archive, 2005). Exhibitions he has curated include Organisation for Cultural Exchange and Mishap (Hong Kong/Melbourne, 2003) and his own mMK (mini-Museum von Kaspar, since 1996).

4 HUI-SHU LEE is an art historian specializing in classical Chinese painting with a side interest in modern and contemporary visual culture. Trained at National Taiwan University and Yale University, she has worked in the National Palace Museum, Taipei, and taught at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology as well as Stanford University before joining the Art History Department of University of Califorinia at Los Angeles in 2000.

SZE TSUNG LEONG is an artist whose work has been ex h i b i t ed intern a t i on a l ly and is i n c lu d ed in the perm a n e nt co l l ecti o ns of the Mu s eum of Modern Art in New York , t h e San Fra n c i s c o Mu s eum of Modern Art , and the Hi g h Mu s eum of Art in At l a n t a , a m o n g o t h e rs . He is the rec i p i e nt of a Gu g gen h e im Fell o wship and a grant from the New York S t a t e Council on the Art s . His book Hi s tory Im a g e s , p u b l i s h ed by Stei d l , wi l l be rel e a s e d this fall . His work is repre s e n ted by Yossi Milo Gall e ry in New York .

C A ROL (Y I N G H UA) LU is a researcher, critic, and curator of Chinese contemporary art based in Beijing. She is currently the China researcher for Asia Art Archive. She is a graduate of the Critical Studies Program at the Malmö Art Academy, Lund University, Sweden. She has curated a number of contemporary art exhibitions in China and Europe. She was an invited curator of the CityScape Program at ARCO ’06. She has given talks at international conferences and contributes regularly to both international and Chinese art publications.

ADELE TA N is completing her Ph.D. at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, and is Assistant Editor at Third Text.

JOHN TA N C O C K was educated at Downing College, Cambridge (M.A.), and the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London (Ph.D.). From 1967 to 1973 he was Associate Curator at Philadelphia Museum of Art. He has worked with Sotheby's since 1973 and is currently Senior Vice-President in the department of Impressionist and Modern Paintings and Sculpture, where his primary focus is on the Asian region.

C H R I S T I NA Y Ü is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. She received a master’s degree in Art History from Boston University and a bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College.

5 ʜ ow to uʀʙaɴɪze a specɪaʟ ecoɴomɪc zo ɴ e ﹖ tʜe 2005 ʙɪeɴɴaʟe of uʀʙaɴɪsm aɴd a ʀcʜɪtectuʀe ɪɴ sʜeɴzʜeɴ e d uaʀd koeɢeʟ

City Metamorphosis, t h e a t re project d irected by Meng Jinghui for the opening cere m o n y. Photo: E d u a r d Koegel.

In recent years it has become fashionable in China to hold international biennales and exhibitions addressing urban development. Every important city has had at least one of them in the last few years, focusing on architectural development, urban artistic expression, and so on. Why is this important, and why should a city like Shenzhen focus on these issues? In my opinion the reason is simple but clear. To urbanize the behaviour of citizens, a cultural consciousness has to be developed, an awareness that changes the feeling of responsibility of the ordinary city dweller towards the public sphere. This is a goal for future development in the social, theoretical, and artistic field—that is, to form a pluralistic approach for the challenges ahead and at the same time to root lifestyles in contemporary culture. Turbulent urban development like that in China during the past twenty-five years calls for action now, and for new means of communication. Shenzhen, as a model city for the Open Door Policy, is still at the forefront of urban development and, therefore, an important place for discussion of the current situation.

In Shenzhen, independent curator Yung Ho Chang, who is Professor for Architecture and Head of the Department of Architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, organized the 2005 Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture under the slogan City, Open Door!—Strategies for Building and Inhabiting the City. He invited about eighty participants, mostly from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, but also from the United States, Canada, Australia, Italy, and Germany. Besides architects and urban planners, he invited filmmakers, photographers, and multimedia artists, as well as students responsible for Internet-based projects and research projects at different universi-

6 ties around the globe. With graphic design, industrial design, urban journals, fashion, and even the theatre project City Metamorphosis, directed by Meng Jinghui, that was staged at the opening, almost all possible permutations of art and creative expression found their place within the Overseas Chinese Art Terminal (OCAT) contemporary art centre in Shenzhen.

The diversity of approaches to changes in urban lifestyles in contemporary China showed how complex this phenomenon is, and the projects of the international participants in the exhibition can by read as positive examples or commentary from the outside. On one hand, the Biennale clarified the current state of discussion on urban issues in China; on the other, it opened itself up to the dark side of high-speed development, exemplified by the problems of migrants, the so-called Urban Villages with extremely high density, and the partly informal and illegal constructions, as well as the role of citizens and their behaviour in the process of urbanization.

Under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, the Open Door Policy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) made the founding of the Special Economic Zone in Shenzhen twenty-five years ago possible. Today the majority of the inhabitants are migrants. The nonstop influx of people and the absence of a traditional cultural network gave way to this unique development. The economic success of Shenzhen made the city a model for many others to follow.

The sponsor and host of the Biennale, the city of Shenzhen, understood perfectly that input was needed for the renewal of urban ideals in a fast-changing society that faces so many unsolved problems such as pollution, energy shortages, disappearing identity, and an ever-growing social imbalance.

D ow n t o wn under construction: The new centre of Shenzhen. Photo: E d u a r d Koegel.

7 City Metamorphosis, t h e a t re project d irected by Meng Jinghui for the opening cere m o n y. Photo: E d u a r d Koegel..

This Biennale, with its wisely composed program, always had in mind how far the local political community would go without losing face if they did not show only the biggest and fastest projects but also addressed the unsolved issues of urban growth. Nevertheless, the Biennale also showed that the diversity of the concepts on display and the comments by all sorts of artists are not satisfactory substitutes for the lack of cultural agreement within Chinese urban society today. The process of the cultural awakening of the individual in mass society can be seen only as a very delicate plant that has to be nourished for years to come. Shenzhen was, in the last twenty years, constantly at the forefront of urban change, but it also successfully navigated a commercial market that brought a cheap labour force to the global economy.

In his introduction to the exhibition, Yung Ho Chang made clear that the problem today is not only architectural development but also the urbanization of the mind, and with that the conceptual quality of strategies for future development. He also gave some hints for his point of view in the discussion: (a) the city is more important than the single building, (b) the Chinese city has character but is missing quality, (c) architecture is more than a monument, (d) architecture is relevant to the development of society, and (e) design improves living conditions.

These points addressed the most important issues, but it left one thing out: an analysis of the character and driving forces behind urbanization. Of course, this is not the failure of the curator or his team, and the participants cannot be blamed for missing this important part—it is simply something that could not be easily exhibited. But this issue points to one of the most interesting problems in the process of rapid deconstruction of old ideologies within concepts of a contemporary urban environment in China. Local leaders and the CCP navigate development with many shortcomings and thereby avoid any kind of visible theory behind their moves. To give some hint about the current situation, I will offer a chronology of modules for a discussion on the logic behind urban development in China.

8 The basis for development today can be traced back to the radical political movements of the late 1950s. Together with the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong started the People’s Commune Movement in 1958. The People’s Commune was based on the socialist ideal of new “model units” for development, first in rural areas and later in the cities. After the Great Leap Forward failed, the model units were redefined and, from 1964 onwards, promoted by Mao Zedong and the CCP: “Learning from Dazhai in agricultural development” became the most powerful slogan for rural development in the following years until the late 1970s.1

Mao coined another catchphrase related to a model of development for industrial growth in 1964: “Learning from Daqing.” The oilfield of Daqing in northern China was discovered in the early 1960s, and many workers from all over the country came to build a new kind of urbanization on the basis of self-help according to the principles of Maoism. Prime Minister Zhou Enlai described this as “combining cities with the countryside and workers with peasants and creating conditions conductive to production and convenience for people’s lives,”2 and the idea of development through shining examples was created and gave way to two models (rural and urban) for the new society. In the utopia of Chinese socialism, the city was meant to dissolve into the countryside, and the rural areas would become industrialized in a “war against nature.”

In the planned society of Mao Zedong, the urban planning departments of the cities and the state-owned institutes for architectural and urban planning had to close after the Cultural Revolution started in 1966. Instead of planning institutions, the previously mentioned models of Daqing and Dazhai were promoted to the local communes and work units. These models were integrated into a controlled economy, so the planning institutions were no longer needed. This sounds strange in a planned society, but it was a consequence of the proposed development according to the model units. In the 1970s, the planning institutes were slowly rehabilitated and the structure of urban planning and architectural development was able to start again.

D ow n t o wn under construction: The new centre of Shenzhen. Photo: E d u a r d Koegel.

9 The young generation looks at the proposal for the urban future. Photo: E d u a rd Koegel.

Two months before Mao Zedong passed away, in 1976, a terrible earthquake, not far from Beijing and with more than 240,000 victims, destroyed the city of Tangshan. China refused international aid for the rebuilding of the city, and relief planning became a sign of national strength. The planners decided that the best solution for their experience was in the above-mentioned model development. The new leader, Hua Guofeng, proposed the model of Daqing as the ideal to follow for rebuilding. Tangshan became the last model town of socialism in the late 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s.

1 0 The former industrial halls of the Oveseas Chinese Art Te r minal were divided by black translucent screens and used for the display of th e exhibits. P h o t o : E d u a rd Koegel.

After Deng Xiaoping initiated economic reform in 1978, the urban structure of cities had to respond quickly to new needs without taking the time for long discussions. As a consequence, the system of urban planning had to totally change. But with the new development of Special Economic Zones in Shenzhen, Zhuhai, and other places, the idea of the model was raised to a larger scale and focused on the economy.

On the basis of experience from the “model development” in the 1960s and 1970s, the new Open Door Policy produced new types of socioeconomic units, starting with model soldier, model worker, model work unit, and so on. The local planners and policy makers gained new power and had to adapt old national models to the new local conditions. The “war against nature” made it possible to change the landscape in a radical way to satisfy the need of economic development.

At the beginning of economic reform, those in charge did not start from scratch with the Special Economic Zones but from the old “models.” With the introduction of market housing, where work and living became separated, the work units as spatial units began to disappear at an increased rate. The identity of the individual was no longer based within the circles of the old work units, but rather moved to the new Micro Residential Districts, places where inhabitants could buy their own private accommodations with an architectural style ranging from “European” to the stylish “Commune by the Great Wall.” In the new Chinese theme parks of architectural expression, nothing is impossible—but there also exists little meaning.

With this history in mind, the question arises as to whether Chinese architects, planners, and politicians follow a trial-and-error method in order to find new solutions to the problems that arrived with high-speed development, or whether they still try to follow old ideologies. But it is clear, without doubt, that those in power are very aware of the problems that lie ahead. Their first objective is to secure the political leadership of the CCP. Therefore, we see today a flexible model of planning that always tries to integrate the newest issues. Whereas, on the one hand, responsible planners and politicians build an ever-more-perfect planning structure, new problems occur and

1 1 In the section “Film City,” the visitors could follow different multimedia and video installations. Photo: E d u a r d Koegel. require new solutions. In order to transform society without losing political power, today’s politicians and planners would also like to solve problems by proposing “models.” Their basis can be found in the “war against nature,” the models of Daqing and Dazhai, and a pragmatic flexibility that foils all clear-cut theory.

Twenty-five years ago, Shenzhen was founded as a Special Economic Zone and as a buffer zone along the border of the capitalist enclave of Hong Kong. It was not the only city with this status, but it was the most successful one. Today, Shenzhen is still a model for other big and mid-sized cities in China. As a young city without the burden of history, Shenzhen is still a forerunner on many urban issues. Some of the topics are related to rapid development, others to the migration of workers from the countryside to the city. Yung Ho Chang once stated: “A whole region—the Pearl River Delta—was turned from hills into flat plains in less than two decades.” The radical reconstruction of the landscape—“the war against nature”—and the problems that followed related to sustainable development in conjunction with unsolved issues of mass-mobility and so on, makes it clear why a Biennale of this kind in Shenzhen makes sense and is useful as an incubator for a much-needed discussion.

During the opening weekend, in December 2005, a few panel discussions were held with international participation. The difference between foreign models of interpretation, explanations by local participants, academic positions, and the real need for solutions appeared in the diversity of the arguments and the need for global exchange in order to find a better understanding of future problems. The team around Yung Ho Chang avoided the mistake of focusing on trendy themes by presenting a broad range of topics; thus, the first Biennale on Urbanism and Architecture in Shenzhen stirred up discussion that built up a platform for exchange that transcended surface issues.

For further information on the Biennale, see www.shenzhenbiennale.cn.

Notes 1 Dazhai is a village in Shanxi province. It was an ordinary village until the 1960s when Chairman Mao published this slogan and set up Danqing as a national agricultural model for all the farmers across the country to learn from. Learning from Danqing is the title of a book that had been used as propaganda material. 2 “Ching Fa: Days the Taching People Will Not Forget,” in China Reconstructs 26, no.4 (April 1977), 16.

1 2 tʜe au t ʜ o ʀ ɪ t ʏ of ʙeau t ʏ sze tsuɴɢ ʟeoɴɢ ov e ʀv ɪ e ws

1 2

3 4 1. Chunshu, Xuanwu District, B e i j i n g, 2004. 2. Xinjie Kou, Xuanwu district, N a n j i n g, 2004. 3. Fengdu, Chongquing Municipality, 2 0 0 2 . 4. Nan Shi, Huangpu District, S h a n g h a i , 2004. Courtesy of the artist an d Yossi Milo Gallery, New Yo r k .

Cities attain a state of beauty—however subjective, contested, or difficult to define—either as a result of a long, unplanned process of evolution, or by being constructed according to particular definitions of beauty. Unplanned beauty emerges out of an organic process of growth where a city or town reaches a state of aesthetic and structural harmony not though any willful design but through the slow accretions of time. The general agreement that medieval street patterns or traditional hillside towns are beautiful relates to the aesthetics of the natural order, which is one of the most accepted forms of beauty. In other words, these streets and towns are regarded as beautiful because they have reached a perceived harmony with the natural. Beauty, in these situations, is not so much intended as evolved over time.

There is another expression of beauty on an urban scale that has achieved particular dominance because of the forcefulness necessary for its execution. Planned beauty, like its unplanned counterpart, conveys the idea of harmony. But, unlike its counterpart, it does not necessarily align with the natural. Instead, the aim is to reach an ordered harmony with ideologies, forms of power, or social structures. Beauty in this case is a tool defined and enlisted to convey beliefs, orders, and hierarchies. The scale of forces needed for this type of urban planning and design means, more often than not, that the definition of beauty rests with those with the power to construct it. Planned beauty, manifested at the size of the city, is imposed.

13 d e m o ʟ ɪ t ɪ o ɴ s

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7 8 5. Beijing Xilu, Jingan District, S h a n g h a i , 2004. 6. No. 3 Huashizhong Fourth Lane, Chongwen District, B e i j i n g, 2003. 7. Qipu Lu II, Zhabei District, S h a n g h a i , 2004. 8. Siming Xilu, Siming District, X i a m e n , 2004. Courtesy of the artist and Yossi Milo Gallery, New Yo r k .

The belief that beauty can be conflated with social ordering in the urban scheme has historically formed one of the main goals of the discipline of city planning. In China, the tradition of imperial city planning was seen as a form within which society could be organized. The urban plan was considered beautiful primarily because it reflected the structuring of society within a divine order: the plan was centered on the palace, the symbolic form of the emperor as the personification of heaven, around which tiers of society were arranged in hierarchical order within a planned grid. In Europe, the concentration of monarchial and military power, which developed prominently dur- ing the seventeenth century, enabled the planning of cities not only as symbolic forms for authori- ty, such as Versailles, but as tools to facilitate control over society.

This lineage of beauty as a way to represent and foster social harmony and control forms the basis of “urban beautification,” a term now widely in use and synonymous with urban regeneration and redevel opm en t . P l a n n ed be a uti fic a ti on , wh i ch began in the domain of the imperial and mon a rch i a l , continued and expanded its development through the social changes of the mid-nineteenth century that underlie modern society. During this time, Europe and the United States were rapidly transforming into societies driven by the market economy, and urban environments had to be adjusted to accommodate the new life.

Beautification was seen as a method to package and deploy the significant urban changes required by the new society. One of the clearest expressions of beauty imposed on an urban scheme was Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s “strategic beautification” of Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, under Napoleon III. As opposed to the imperial urban plans of China or Versailles, which

14 st ʀ e e ts

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11 12 9. Zhonghua Donglu, C h i k a n , Guangdong Prov i n c e, 2004. 10. Xuelongdi Jie, Nan Shi, Huangpu District, S h a n g h a i , 2 0 0 4 . 11. Tiantong Bei Yuan I, Chanping District, B e i j i n g,2004. 12. New Stre e t , S h i j i ch e n g , L a n d i a n ch a n g, Haidian District, B e i j i n g,2004. Courtesy of the artist and Yossi Milo Gallery, New Yo r k . were built from blank slates, Haussmann’s beautification was a strategy to transform the existing. This strategy incorporated two of the most influential tools of urban beautification, slum clearance and the widening of streets. What constituted a slum was defined by those with the power to transform urban areas, and the arguments for slum clearance were linked with the perception that urban configurations characterized by tight, medieval patterns of streets promoted disease, social degeneracy, poverty, and crime. Demolishing these areas, perceived as difficult to police and control, was seen as a way to promote sanitation and social health.

The visible manifestation of urban beautification was achieved by the boulevard, which provided the city with visual and formal consistency. In Paris, boulevards were faced with uniform facades and defined by vistas of monuments such as the Opéra, Arc de Triomphe, and the Louvre. Yet the purpose was not merely aesthetic, for the functions of beautification transcended the visible. The boulevards were intended to give the city a symbolic structure by connecting and clarifying the hierarchies of urban institutions, to allow rapid movement throughout the city for the many forms of traffic (official, military, commercial, and public), and to aid in the policing of the city by the elimination or containment of labyrinthine urban districts.

The elements that came to be accepted as requirements for urban development—slum clearance, wide avenues, and uniform facades—were the basis of one of the most explicit movements to impose particular ideas of beauty on the city, the City Beautiful Movement. This movement was manifested most clearly in built form at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, also called the “White City.” Its main proponent, the architect and city planner Daniel Burnham,

1 5 believed that the unsightly aspects of city life embodied by crowded tenements and narrow streets should be cleared away and replaced with airy, ordered avenues and uniform facades in the Beaux-Arts style. It was hoped that social ills of poverty, disease, and crime would be eliminated through the elimination of their environments.

Beauty, like many social constructions, is a product of specific periods of history. In the urban context, one period of history’s idea of beauty is often imposed on past notions—and the form that this takes, as in Haussmann’s Paris and the City Beautiful Movement, is the demolition of the past. Presently there is perhaps no clearer manifestation of these tendencies than in contemporary China, where the combination of unchallenged, centralized power and extreme economic development have enabled one of China’s most significant and extensive urban transformations.

The tradition of authoritarian power that enabled the uniform construction and ordered layouts that once defined Chinese cities is also the tradition enabling their destruction. The rationale for the large-scale dem o l i ti on of trad i ti onal urban fabrics is not so different from the goals ex po u n ded by the urban beautification movements in Europe and the United States. In Beijing, many traditional neighborhoods have been officially labeled as “dangerous” and “dilapidated.” The decay of traditional neighborhoods is the result of an ideologically driven reconfiguration of the original urban fabric that took place as the Communist Party, in the early years of its new state, ordered traditional homes to be transformed from private family households to multifamily compounds. The resulting unregulated constructions and additions dismantled the architectural integrity of the homes and filled the courtyards with haphazard shanties. The decades of state-sponsored disdain of history during the Mao era effectively turned urban fabrics once symbolic of Chinese culture and society into slums.

The demolition of traditional urban fabrics is, in most cases, total. With little or no historical encumbrances, new street patterns, wider streets, and buildings of uniform facades can be imposed on a blank slate. The rationale for this process is primarily economic. As in Haussmann’s Paris, the new city gives an urban face to the new society, while driving out the poor from the city centers. The social order, and its corresponding aesthetic, is one based on giving an urban face to the new wealth, the departure from an uncomfortable past, and the pursuit of the new goals and requirements introduced by the market economy. The form that urban beautification takes in China is not the adjustment and modification of existing city fabrics, but is most often the complete erasure of the past and its replacement with the new. The urban beauty of the socially ordered, imperial past, decayed through ideological neglect, has become a casualty of a new form of beauty. To ask whether this new reality is beautiful or not is irrelevant. The more significant question is, who does this beauty belong to?

This text was originally published in Shaheen Merali, ed., About Beauty (Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2005).

1 6 c u ʟt u ʀaʟ memoʀʏ: aɴ ɪɴteʀɴat ɪ o ɴaʟ sʏm p o s ɪ u m c ʜ ɪ ɴa ʙetweeɴ tʜe past aɴd tʜe futuʀe jo-aɴɴe ʙɪʀɴɪe da ɴ z k e ʀ

Symposium panelists (left to right) Hou Hanru, Carol Lu, Pi Li, and Ute Bauer Meta. Courtesy of House of World Culture s , B e r l i n .

The catastrophe of the Nazi dictatorship in Germany and the brutalities of the former DDR regime in East Germany have created a scarred society that is deeply committed to Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung (confronting and overcoming the past). This commitment is integrated into the public education system, the media, the law, and, above all, into cultural policies in the public domain. It is therefore not surprising that the House of World Cultures and the Bundeszentrale fuer politische Bildung (Federal Centre for Political Education) recently organized an ambitious three-day symposium (March 24–26, 2006) on the question of cultural memory in China in conjunction with a series of exhibitions, events, performances, film programs, and artists’ talks, titled China Between the Past and the Future.

The first day was dedicated to the topics “Cultural Memory in China and Europe,”“Collective and Social Memory,”“Trauma, Amnesia, and Anamnesis,” and “Body, Identity, and Memory.” Among the participants were specialists in Chinese studies from Germany and France as well as art historians from China (Zhu Qingsheng, Leng Lin, Zuo Jing). Also present was the dancer and choreographer Jin Xing, from Shanghai. While the first day concentrated on a specifically German approach to Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung, and the conviction that China should engage in a similar if painful confrontation with the past, the second day was dedicated to fascinating debates among Chinese performance artists, poets, artists, curators, composers, and theatre directors on “Cultural Memory as Artistic Praxis,”“Exhibition Praxis in China,” and “Memory in Music, Dance, and Theatre.”

1 7 The second day opened with a detailed analysis by specialists from the German Federal Centre for Political Education of the fifty-two part television Chinese “history soap” On the Way to a Republic. This analysis showed “how politics of the People’s Republic of China in relation to history are staged in the media” and how the “Master Narrative of Marxism” as well as key figures in Chinese political history are “being subjected to a process of revisionism”. In the second session of the day the artists Zhang Dali and Wang Qingsong, as well as the poet Xi Chuan, all from Beijing, opened a debate on the supposed freedom of capitalism and of the necessity and possibili- ties of contemporary art in the context of cultural memory. Zhang Dali discussed his own work that incorporates manipulated historical photographs. These historical manipulations, he argued, involved not only removing or adding political friends and foes but also an aesthetic process. This process is designed to “highlight” the subject through, for example, the addition of pine trees for symbolic purposes or changing perspectives so that the key subject is not dwarfed by his companions. It is also part of a “beautification process.” Zhang Dali stressed that he is just an observer who is conducting research in this area:“I provide documentation; I am interested in the history of photography in the Republic.” The poet Xi Chuan discussed fake memories and contemporary “consumers of cityscapes.” He described taking German tourists, who had found Beijing “too modern,” to a popular lake district in Beijing where drinking cappuccino under Chinese roofs could simultaneously provide the illusion of the “typical” and the exotic.

The third session of the day was among the highlights of the symposium. Ute Meta Bauer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was the moderator, and participants included curators Carol Lu and Pi Li, from Beijing, and Chinese curator Hou Hanru, from Paris. Carol Lu raised the question as to whether cultural memory in China is only of the present (not the past), and whether the pace of change in China now is so fast that one needs to be forgetful in order to deal with the future, and noted that “one system is being thoroughly negated by another.” Lu warned of the dangers of memory functioning without a deep understanding of the past, of an inability to contextualize, and of “inconsequential historical dramas” at the cost of history and memory. For Hou Hanru, one of the key questions is how to preserve criticality while contemporary art is increasingly embraced by mainstream institutions. He described the deep challenge of remaining independent and alternative in this context, the difficulty of negotiating this and of opening up spaces for this negotiation. One of the crucial issues, he argued, is how much space is allowed for minority culture, intellectual thought, and values. Ute Meta Bauer referred to the burden of being the “critical voice.” Pi Li criticized contemporary Chinese art that has been strongly supported by the Western market, especially Political Pop, arguing that the artists have gained not only praise but personal wealth and questioning what it is that they want to achieve. In the concluding discussion Hou Hanru spoke of a situation that emerges not only from the pressure of the global but also from the needs of the local without a clear vision of what “modern” should be. Carol Lu raised the issue of whether independence can be better achieved through smaller-scale exhibitions and publics. In a discussion on the accompanying exhibition Between the Past and the Present: New Photography and Video from China, curated by Wu Hung and Christopher Phillips, Hou Hanru pointed out to his German hosts that the city of Berlin was also engaged in the negation of its memory through “modernization” and the removal of architectural traces of Stalinist Berlin: “It is being sanitized.” The panel concluded with what the participants termed a “complicated” discussion about the role of well-known Chinese curators who are determining, through large-scale exhibitions, Chinese cultural policy abroad.

1 8 The following panel, with composer Liu Sola, from Beijing; theatre specialist Elisabeth Wichmann-Walczak, from the University of Hawaii; theatre director Cao Kefei, from Beijing; and the German composer Heiner Goebbels provided a fascinating excursion into the impact of the European classical tradition and Russian revolutionary music on the elimination of a fixed tone system in Chinese music, especially during the Cultural Revolution. Liu Sola spoke of the curse of revolutionary songs and of their strong emotional power even today. Wichmann-Walczak spoke of “induced cultural imperative amnesia,” while Cao Kefei stressed the precarious financial conditions and the enormous commercial pressure that theatre in China is experiencing today.

The concluding day of the symposium addressed the topic “Urban Space: Places of Memory and Forgetting.” Participants included Jasper Becker, a journalist from Beijing; artist and curator Huang Rui, from Beijing; as well as Kang Min Jay, an urban planner from Taiwan. Becker returned to the topic of the “sanitizing” of Berlin and suggested that it was appropriate for shedding light on similar developments in Beijing. A highly charged debate followed on the loss of monuments and architecture through the extremely rapid modernization and development of Beijing. Huang Rui, who was responsible for the highly successful development of the Factory 798 area of Dashanzi, with its galleries and industrial landmarks from the 1950s, believes that its success has been the result of its strong community support and the fact that memory was not deleted in the process of the development. He provided the example that slogans from the time of the Cu l tu ra l Revo luti on were pre s erv ed and not rem oved , Huang said : “ Pre s erva ti on must also inclu de the negative. We can’t put a distance between us and reality. We created something new—a co-habita- tion of several layers of history.”

The symposium concluded with a general discussion among participants, organizers (Lydia Haustein, Michael Lackner, and Christoph Müller-Hofstede), and the public. Differing notions about restoration, ruin, and preservation were debated, as was the issue of Chinese memories of the recent past in the context of a global memory.

In conjunction with the accompanying exhibition, a further discussion took place with curators Wu Hung and Christopher Phillips, Hou Hanru, and Manray Hsu, curator of the upcoming Liverpool Biennale. Hou Hanru continued his discussion about the normalization and “legalization” of the curatorial in China and the creation of an internal market. “The price we had to pay was how to deal with a new norm a l i ty,” he said. “ How to maintain differen ce ? ” Also discussed was the issue of how to “occupy” formerly public spaces that are now being commercialized.

This ambitious symposium, along with the exhibition, artists’ discussions, film program, and superb opera and theatre performances that will be presented at the House of World Cultures in Berlin from March until May 2006 provide a worthy platform for considering cultural memory not only in China but also in the West (especially Berlin), which is experiencing the commercial- ization and loss of its own public spaces through political sanitization, beautification, and erasure. For further information, see www.hkw.de.

1 9 f ʀaɢmeɴted memoʀʏ aɴd eɴeʀɢ ʏ: cʜɪɴese co ɴ t e m p o ʀa ʀʏ aʀt aɴd ɪts muʟt ɪ p ʟ e ʟaʏeʀs of ɪdeoʟoɢ ʏ c a ʀoʟ (ʏ ɪ ɴ ɢ ʜ ua) ʟu

Real estate sign in Beijing that reads “ E v e r ything can be torn down and re b u i l t , except for the ‘Boston old arch i t e c t u re ’ ! ” P h o t o : Carol Lu.

Because I was born in the late 1970s, cultural memory has more of a sense of immediacy for me than does memory of the past. This is a sentiment shared by many people my age and younger, and unfortunately, we have an extremely limited sense of history.

For many young Chinese people today, cultural memory is the memory of the present—it is neither of the past nor anchored to the future. Instead, cultural memory is that of the television series I watched last night, the blogs I’ve read recently, the computer games I’ve been playing, the music on my iPod, and the latest street fashion. It’s the memory of popular culture.

Thus, the kind of cultural memory we possess is largely image based, isolated, fragmented, temporary, unstable, sometimes romanticized, and in most cases distorted and confusing. Even though digital technology puts an increasing variety of facilities at our disposal to document, archive, and preserve memory, it is getting equally convenient and habitual to replace, update, reprogram, and even manipulate and fabricate memory so that it becomes not a continuum, but a fluid and highly variable experience.

We handle memory in a heartless way. Cultural memory is everything that is happening right now rather than in the past. Modern technology and lifestyles can make things out of date in a split

2 0 second. The turnover of events and the pace of life are so fast that we need to become forgetful in order to confront with what is coming our way.

For my generation, so-called culture is manifested as fragments of memory in time. The last one hundred years of transformation in Chinese society and culture are seen as a factitious separa- tion and disconnection of generations. It has not been a progressive process of evolution dominated by one single sequence of thought. More often than not, this kind of transformation has YIn Xiuzhen, W h e re is the Bre a k ? 2 0 0 5 , installation. Photo: Carol Lu. been realized through one system being thoroughly negated by another. In the process of negation, the continuation of cultural development itself was completely severed.

For younger Chinese people born after the mid 1970s, the impact of the 1989 democracy movement is still far from being felt. The students’ movement that ended in bloodshed is as signif- icant to Chinese history as any political movement and transition that had taken place in China before. Afterward, the country steered abruptly onto a different track of development that we all find ourselves on today. Since the late 1980s, China has plunged headlong into forward-looking economic development. Physical and material construction of the country has been going at full s peed . In depen dent thinking and talk of i deo l ogy, h owever, a re disco u ra ged . The state sti ll exerc i s e s its bitter censorship while it tries to sweeten the general public with economic possibilities.

In China the vibrant contemporary art scene of the 1980s was characterized by idealistic, frenetic, and diverse artistic experiments, heated intellectual debates, and conscious social interventions and engagements, despite the lack of venues and resources that we have today. This too died out after the 1989 China Avant/Garde exhibition, which was shut down prematurely by the police.

Following the fateful events of 1989, the country seemed to reach a consensus that only economic pursuit would be considered legitimate and thus safe. The first half of the 1990s was filled with confusion, rage, and pent-up energy among Chinese intellectuals and thinkers. Under such desperate circumstances, historical memory became the only resort for contemporary artists. Their confrontational status with the official system, their disorientation in a suddenly paralyzed intellectual environment, drove many contemporary Chinese artists to fall back on the memory for inspiration, comfort, and expression. If it was not alright to discuss the present situation, it would be alright to discuss what had happened in the past, even though this kind of discussion usually had its reference to the present. It was a strategic and disguised approach to satirize the spiritual confinement of that time.

This seemed to be the only way that the majority of Chinese artists could come to terms with the troubled memory of the nation and the totalitarian regime—by poking fun at it, downgrading it aesthetically, and taking memory apart and using it in any way they wanted without feeling any moral remorse.

21 Wu Xiaojun, L e t ’s B e To g e t h e r, 2 0 0 5 , installation. Photo: Carol Lu.

Si n ce the early 1990s, t h ere have been redundant attem p ts in the practi ce of Chinese con tem pora r y artists to reuse symbols, images, and styles from different periods of Chinese history. Many of these references came particularly from the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Cynical pop, kitschy art, and, later on, conceptual photography thrived on appropriating and quoting h i s tory and mem ory, l e aving a bad taste . Thanks to their nostalgia for trad i ti ons and their mem ory of political movements from their childhood, this kind of art became the mainstream of the period. On the other hand, the kind of education these artists received was inadequate due to the disruption of the Cultural Revolution. They didn’t necessarily have a deep and full understanding of, and connection to, the traditional. As a result, the content and style of the work produced during that period seemed weak, superficial, and lacking in diversity. In the meantime, this work was frequ en t ly sold to, ex h i bi ted in, and received by the West in a way that cre a ted false impre s s i on s for some Western researchers of Chinese contemporary art.

Most of the works to come out of this period end up being like the period dramas that populate every television channel in China today. They are generally out of context, pure entertainment dressed up in historical outfits, inconsequential, and, in most cases, taken only at face value at the cost of the history or memory.

The discourse that prevailed in the art practice of most artists in the 1990s appeared to be one characterized by unanimously sarcastic, defiant, and angry statements about the regime and the lack of political autonomy. Meanwhile, the autonomy of art was put on hold. It was more a tool for venting and critiquing than a free creative agent. It was a period when content was prioritized over form.

Art was used over and over again to reveal social wounds, to articulate the pent-up frustrations of a nation, and to make political statements. The artists, too, felt a sense of social responsibility to be

2 2 Wu Xiaojun, L i b e ration F1– 2004–1 Model 1/4 (car model), 2004. Photo: Carol Lu. a voice. Art as a socialized product also sold well to an art market dominated by Western buyers who were keen to understand China. It also guaranteed these artists entry into international exhibitions as part of a collective identity and voice the outside world was eager to see and hear.

In art criticism, the Communist mentality of “art serving the people” remained dominant. Critics always tried to analyze the social, ideological, and political content of a work: what it represented, what it meant. Art had to have meaning, and this meaning had to be something useful—some- thing that praised, something that criticized, something that could give us food for thought.

This usefulness was quickly picked up by the West as a window into Chinese society, which, in turn, further fed into the tendency to produce something that had to take a position and voice a concern.

By the end of the 1990s, as China’s economy quickly picked up and living standards improved, as well as when the first generation of single children grew up into their late teens and early twenties, a wave of individualism began to set in on a nation known for its collective consciousness.

While the collective memory of living a communal way of life and of being swept into the mass movements of the 1950s to the 1970s was still very much alive with those born in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, a new awareness of the self began to emerge in those born in the 1970s. These young people firmly believed in the gods of materialism and were kept at a safe distance from the memory of the turbulent times experienced by their parents, who had been uprooted, suffered f rom starva ti on , and lived with the re s i due of s evere ideo l ogical bra i nwashing in the 1960s and 70s.

It’s Me, an exhibition curated by Leng Lin in the Worker’s Cultural Palace inside the Confucius Temple, Beijing in 2000 was one of the very earliest initiatives to acknowledge and explore the

2 3 Wang We i , Tra p, 2 0 0 5 , installation. C ourtesy of the artist. rising consciousness of individual well-being and individual existence through art. Although the exhibition was closed down during the opening, it was an important sign in contemporary art practice that revealed a growing awareness of the self among contemporary artists and curators since the late 1990s.

The Post-Sense Sensibility Movement that came about in the late 1990s was an attempt by a group of contemporary artists such as Qiu Zhijie, Wang Wei, Wu Ershan, Shi Qing and Zhang Hui to explore the possibilities of non-ideological, non-narrative, and non-conceptual art in time-based and site-specific set ups. The movement quickly came into the spotlight and became notorious for the use of human bodies, live animals, and dead fetuses in some of the works shown in these confrontational exhibitions. Yet it soon became alienated from mainstream art practice.

As we enter into the new millennium, China has continued to promote the merits of economic well being and has done little with our “spiritual construction,” as the government likes to call it. While more and more people are becoming wealthier, the inadequacy and loopholes of the social system in China have begun to reveal themselves and cause discontents that have triggered nationwide debates. Many people feel insecure and internally rootless. As a friend of mine observes, some very rich and powerful people in China subscribe to Buddhism, as they feel guilty and insecure about their wealth and pray for protection, while poor and desperate people tend to go to Christian churches for comfort.

Thanks to the abundant economic possibilities, many adventurers and dreamers have emerged in this spiritually deprived country. More and more individuals have become known overnight as icons for some incredibly miraculous and heroic deed that they’ve undertaken since 2004 as a re sult of the govern m en t’s attem pt to divert public atten ti on from the con s equ en ces of i n c re a s i n g ly unbalanced development in the country towards entertainment-saturated mass media, which in turn carve out such appealing role models and cases. These tend to be average citizens who have

24 Liu Ding, Samples from the Tra n s i t i o n — P r o d u c t s , 2 0 0 5 , installed in the second Guangzhou Tr i e n n a l e. C ourtesy of the artist. been made personalities through the campaigns led by the powerful machine of mass media, the number one memory maker of our times.

The Super-Girl phenomenon of 2004 is a perfect example of such nationwide obsession with a nobody turning national star. Super-Girl was more than a popular television program that was modelled on the American Idol program from the United States. It not only had millions of Chinese people glued to the TV screen every Friday evening for the few months of its run, it also fed into the population’s thirst for idols and objects of worship, as well as dreams. In a populist approach, the media aggressively churns out a variety of role models and offers all forms of lucky draws that make many people, especially those living on the bottom rung of society, believe that there is an odd chance for them to win. One day, they too, could be the one, since society lacks any sort of structure, and is in the middle of inventing and establishing itself from scratch.

In the contemporary art field, there are artists who still remain obsessed with describing and commenting on urbanization, modernization, globalization, and the ideological crises in China and the commercial success they bring. And they still use art as a social voice. However, more and more contemporary artists working in China today, especially those from younger generations, are turning their gaze away from abstract and generalized discussions of social and political issues. Instead, they are looking more from a specific and microscopic perspective, and place their own experience and personal relationship to society ahead of collective consciousness. The voices are intuitive, diverse, personal, and playful.

Where content used to rule over form, form itself has been given increasing attention and importance. “Art serves the people” is no longer a maxim that artists today subscribe to. Art is returning to being a vehicle primarily of personal expression. The desire and effort to break away from a collective identity for contemporary Chinese art and establish individual artistic systems continue to gather strength, picking up the momentum left behind from the late 1990s.

25 Lin Yi l i n , Missing Dolly, 2 0 0 5 , s c u l p t u re installed in the second Guangzhou Tr i e n n a l e. P hoto: Carol Lu.

Art practice has begun to diversify, embracing a wider range of media and branching out to other disciplines. Building on the commercial success of older generations of contemporary artists, younger members of the art world in China no longer have to wrestle with the lack of an art market or venues for art making. Experiments and explorations of non-object-based, site-specific, time-relevant, and multidisciplinary practice have grown in number and dynamism, thus giving rise to terms su ch as “m ac ro - a r t ,” referring to art proj ects practi ced with all of the above men ti on ed characteristics and ways of thinking.

The rise of the individual, however, still has a very different meaning and follows a different path from elsewhere in the world. As China’s economy thrives on cheap labour and mass production, individuals are diminished to minimal wages, minimal living conditions, and minimal ability to think independently. The single-minded pursuit of material gains conditions our minds to accept

2 6 a living space as small as twenty square metres, which is the common size of a single person’s apartment in Shenzhen, where large factory-based mass production is at its most extreme form.

The return to the self, on the other hand, indicates an artists’ inability to relate to society at large. As we continue to live with fragments of memory and a severed history, many of the difficulties and restless feelings as well as the confusion and uncertainty we Li Yu and Liu Bo, 13 Months of the Year of Dog, 2006. Courtesy of the artists. experience today have arisen from our inability to contextualize things, to put things in a broader framework, to view things beyond themselves. The absence of structures and values in Chinese society, while providing new possibilities in some ways, leads to ruthless and unethical operations and a loss of reference and integrity when making judgments.

Many children today exist not only out of the historical context, but even out of the current one. They take refuge in the fantasy world of the Internet and indulge in computer games. In these games, they find that they are able to make a difference, to become the “real” hero. They have a tendency to retreat from society and refuse to deal with what is going on, and they have no capability or interest to relate and interact with others. Reality, based on the obsession with money and full of problems, offers no attraction or comfort. They create their own memory in the games they play, the Internet world they indulge in. Memory becomes virtual.

This is a revised version of a paper presented at Cultural Memory: An International Symposium on March 25, 2006, at House of World Cultures, Berlin.

Li Yu and Liu Bo, 13 Months of the Year of Dog, 2006. Courtesy of the artists.

2 7 “ɪ’m a ʟazʏ pe ʀ s o ɴ”: ɪ ɴ t e ʀv ɪ ew wɪtʜ taɴɢ mao ʜ o ɴ ɢ

ʙ ɪ ʟ j a ɴa cɪʀɪc

Biljana Ciric: When and how did you first start creating animation? What was your intention?

Tang Maohong: Before animation, I tried doing many other art forms. After experimenting with various mediums and genres, I realized that animation expressed my ideas the best and, further- more, I was most confident in this medium. Animation can satisfy my desire to manipulate an image; when the figures appear in animation they reflect my feelings precisely. The figures themselves are temporary, like you and me, the same as art. Everything happens in a moment, and in the end nothing stays, nothing is permanent.

Biljana Ciric: Orchid Finger is your first animation piece. Can it be understood as an experiment and a turning point for you?

Tang Maohong: It was almost like a return to myself. For me it is more suitable to work on a piece in a more isolated way, making it only for myself.

Tang Maohong, O rchid Finger, 2 0 0 5 , animation still. Courtesy of t he artist.

28 Tang Maohong, O r chid Finger, 2 0 0 5 , animation still. Court esy of the artist.

Biljana Ciric: How would you define the works that you have done before?

Tang Maohong: Trying to find my own way. . . . Sometimes my work is close to myself, sometimes it’s not at all like myself.

Biljana Ciric: How do you know when it’s close to yourself?

Tang Maohong: When I’m not probing the audience or curators, when I’m probing myself. That’s how I know. Competing with oneself is very interesting.

Biljana Ciric: Does there exist a relationship between your earlier work and the animation?

Tang Maohong: Of course there is, but I haven’t tried to analyze it.

Biljana Ciric: You mentioned that animation can satisfy your desire for painting.

Tang Maohong: Yes.

Biljana Ciric: Why the Orchid Finger title? Why not another feminine, theatrical gesture?

29 Tang Maohong, O rch id Finger, 2 0 0 5 , animation still. Courtesy of the artist.

Tang Maohong: Actually, it does not have to be seen necessarily as a feminine gesture. It is a habitual movement, unconventional, artificial, and affected.

Biljana Ciric: Why do you use the Orchid Finger in your work?

Tang Maohong: Because it’s similar to the temperament of images in animation.

Biljana Ciric: How would you define the temperament of your images?

Tang Maohong: A little bit affected, a bit illusory. Everything is fake, but not ugly fake.

Biljana Ciric: Why do you say that it is fake?

Tang Maohong: Everything is fiction, made up.

Biljana Ciric: After you showed the animation, what was the reaction of the audience?

Tang Maohong: Most of them said it was pretty funny. This reaction of “pretty funny” could be interpreted as very bad, but still people were able to look at it. Another interpretation of “pretty funny” could be that the work is actually good.

3 0 Tang Maohong, O rchid Finger, 2 0 0 5 , animation still. Cour tesy of the artist.

Biljana Ciric: How did you understand the comments?

Tang Maohong: I don’t care about them.

Biljana Ciric: What do you care about?

Tang Maohong: I care about the facial expressions of the audience in front of my work. Are they having a conversation with my work or not? I can see those things through their facial expressions. But if they tried to use words to explain their reactions or feelings, I wouldn’t understand them.

Biljana Ciric: Did you think about the relationship between the audience and your animation?

Tang Maohong: I don’t think about it. I don’t think I can imagine that. It’s not something that I can control.

Biljana Ciric: Can the transition from your earlier work to the present animation be defined as a change in your understanding of an artist’s role? Yourself as that artist?

Tang Maohong: In my earlier work I tried to tell something to others. Now I’m trying to tell things to myself—just to ask myself to listen.

3 1 Biljana Ciric: Did your understanding of the artist’s role change?

Tang Maohong: We all search for happiness. This way makes me happy.

Biljana Ciric: What about the artist’s role in society?

Tang Maohong: On the whole it is still passive.

Biljana Ciric: Do you think that in Chinese society artists are useless?

Tang Maohong: The artists that have their own initiative and want to change something are valuable.

Biljana Ciric: Do you enjoy the process of making animation?

Tang Maohong: Yes, a little bit, but as soon as I finish it I don’t want to look at it anymore. It has already passed.

Biljana Ciric: Why are there so many images of the lotus and plum flowers in your animation?

Tang Maohong: I think these images are beautiful. I desire to paint them not Tang Maohong, P h o t o s y n t h e s i s, 2 0 0 0 , p e r f o r m a n c e. Courtesy of the artist. because they represent or symbolize something, but just because I feel the shapes are pretty to draw. And at the same time they make me happy.

Biljana Ciric: Could you tell me something about the new animation that you are preparing?

Tang Maohong: I am not the type of person who plans ahead. That’s why I choose to make animation without a story. It is all composed out of fragments. I accumulate them slowly, and when the time comes, it gets done. So with the animation that I’m working on currently, I can never predict how it will turn out in the end.

Biljana Ciric: How long did it take you to accumulate the images for the first animation piece?

Tang Maohong: Around two months.

32 Biljana Ciric: People appear in the animation in a very passive state, like in the scenes of artificial respiration and massage. Are they doing massage?

Tang Maohong: This is not important. It is just one person molested by a few others. In the film they are in an unusual state. The human being is also a “stage prop” like other objects in the ani- mation, but even more passive.

Biljana Ciric: Who are they? Why did you choose people in uniforms?

Tang Maohong: They are all me. Actually aren’t we all wearing uniforms in certain occasions? I mean we might be asked to dress in a uniform, or we sometimes wish to dress in some kind of uniform. A uniform emphasizes and establishes relations among people. There is always one party which is more passive than the other. I’m interested in presenting these relations out of order. The key is to make it chaotic. The goal is disorder.

Biljana Ciric: Do you think there are iconic images of Chinese society in your animation?

Tang Maohong: I think trying to figure out the meaning of the work is uninteresting. There is no reason why it exists. It all happens by coincidence. When I’m working I don’t think about why I draw like this. Actually, the reason I enjoy the process is that I can be unreasonable. I don’t need to tell myself why or explain to the audience. The style of the film is evasive and blurred.

Biljana Ciric: Why did you choose three round screen projections to show this animation?

Tang Maohong: It is to emphasize the feeling of fragmentation. If it’s on a single screen, the first ten seconds and the following ten seconds should appear to have a connection. As my animation is fragmented, it doesn’t need this type of relationship. It doesn’t need any connecting threads. It just flashes across the screen.

Biljana Ciric: Why it is round?

Tang Maohong: A round shape seems more like a detail.

Biljana Ciric: You said about your animation that although it consists of fragments, the ones that you are interested in still have threads of thought, even for yourself.

Tang Maohong: That’s probably the result of editing while I was working on it. I wasn’t aware of it, and I didn’t make any preparations for this piece.

Biljana Ciric: There is an image that often appears—a person’s back is pushed by another person to the other end and is squeezed to some shape. Where does it come from?

Tang Maohong: This is from medical illustrations. I remember the original illustration in talks about growth problems in teenagers, with deformation of the spinal column. They use this method as a treatment.

Biljana Ciric: Do you collect images before making the animation, or visa versa?

3 3 Tang Maohong: Before making my first animation I just liked some images— that’s all. But now, while I’m collecting images, I’m thinking at the same time about how to use them for my future animation.

Biljana Ciric: What images do you like?

Tang Maohong: It’s different every day. Sometimes I like architecture, sometimes I like an instruction chart in a computer game.

Biljana Ciric: Does the Web have big influence on your work? Tang Maohong, H a rv e s t, 2004. Courtesy of the artist.

Tang Maohong: The Internet has influenced me enormously in terms of finding resources or just hanging out.

Biljana Ciric: Is there an animation film that has influenced you?

Tang Maohong: It is Na Zha Conquers the Dragon Kings. I even want to redo it if I have a chance. It tells the story of a kid hero.1

Biljana Ciric: Could you tell me something about your role before your participation in curating exhibitions like Dial 62761232?2

Tang Maohong: Just to have fun—that’s it. But I’m not really full of initiative.

Biljana Ciric: What was your role in the Dial 62761232 exhibition?

Tang Maohong: I didn’t have any role in the curatorial team. I think they had my name written on it because I happened to be there by chance.

Biljana Ciric: For that exhibition you presented a work made of keys , perhaps the most impressive one in the show.

Tang Maohong: That was also a coincidence. That piece was meant for another exhibition. I planned to put keys to my home in the gallery so that people could take them away. This piece seemed well presented in Dial 62761232 and in this kind of exhibition there is no one piece that can have the primary role. The overall form of the exhibition was so strong that there is no work that could surpass it.

Biljana Ciric: So the curatorial process itself is actually the main work?

Tang Maohong: Yes, it can be understood that way. There are many kinds of exhibitions. Sometimes the form surpasses the works. Dial 62761232 was this kind of the exhibition.

34 Biljana Ciric: At that time, could any visitor take the key to your home and get in?

Tang Maohong: Yes. But after forty-five days I changed the lock.

Biljana Ciric: But the audience could enter your private space during the forty-five days?

Tang Maohong: For this work, I gave away keys so that anyone who wished to come could do it. I guaranteed that every key would open the door of my apartment. During that period my work was closely related to my life.

Biljana Ciric: In what kind of state was your life at that time?

Tang Maohong: Very busy, and every night I would come home very late. As soon as I returned home I looked around to see if there were any changes in the apartment. If I found nothing changed I was kind of disappointed. But if I stayed home, I would also be very nervous—it is very contradictory. People are sometimes like this. You do something and you get one result, then you hope to get a different result. And if you get it, you may think about a new one.

Biljana Ciric: When did you move to Shanghai?

Tang Maohong: In 2001, after graduating from China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, I didn’t have a job, and that year I participated in an exhibition at BizArt.

Biljana Ciric: What exhibition?

Tang Maohong: It was an exhibition of half Chinese and half French artists. At this exhibition I met some Shanghainese artists, Jin Feng and Hu Jieming, and they asked me to move to Shanghai to find a teaching position in a school.

Biljana Ciric: Besides the job, was there any other reason for choosing Shanghai?

Tang Maohong: I’m familiar with Shanghai. I went to a specialized secondary school there for four years and I did get a job here. In Hangzhou, after one year, I felt too inactive, so I decided to come to Shanghai and try to do something.

Biljana Ciric: Why did you do most of your exhibitions at BizArt?

Tang Maohong: I didn’t have any other exhibition opportunities. Artists from BizArt are very young, and we have known each other for quite a long time. It’s like a group of friends doing things together. And you don’t have to a pay venue rental in order to make a show. The most important thing is that everybody knows each other well and that they do things together. But I don’t have any feelings towards this city even though I have already spent ten years here.

Biljana Ciric: Isn’t that very difficult?

Tang Maohong: It doesn’t matter. This city is only my studio.

35 Biljana Ciric: Your animation gives the feeling of familiarity and strangeness at the same time.

Tang Maohong: These possess many of my ordinary emotions.

Biljana Ciric: And your relation with the environment?

Tang Maohong: All my surroundings are my sources, and all images can be used.

Biljana Ciric: You were represented by one gallery in Shanghai in the last year. Is the art market interfering with your creative ideas?

Tang Maohong: I have tried hard to avoid interference.

Biljana Ciric: But does interference exist?

Tang Maohong: If it exists, then I try to turn it into a useful element.

Biljana Ciric: What was your very first piece?

Tang Maohong: I was standing on a hill. A friend of mine drew lines on my body to mark the changes of the position of sunlight. I did this piece in Hangzhou in 2000.

Biljana Ciric: Why did you make this performance?

Tang Maohong: At that time I was still a student and I wanted to try something that was outside of the school cirriculum. It was an experiment.

Biljana Ciric: What is your opinion of contemporary Chinese art?

Tang Maohong: I don’t think about big issues. I’m a lazy person.

Notes 1 The story of Nezha has been made into several animated films. One of the most well known is a 1979 production translated into English as Nezha Conquers the Dragon Kings, which won an international award in the U.S.S.R. 2 Dial 62761232 was one of the satellite shows at the 2004 Shanghai Biennale and was curated by a group of young artists from Shanghai. A courier service would deliver the exhibition to you at any location in Shanghai. All you needed to do was dial the number, and the exhibition would arrive in a suitcase.

3 6 tʜɪɴ sʟɪces: mɪcʜaeʟ cʜeʀɴeʏ’s ɪmaɢes of cʜɪɴa

ʜuɪ-sʜu ʟee

Michael Cherney, Untitled Album (H3 album) from the series Bounded By Mountains, 2003–2004, photographs on xuan paper, 26 x 494 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

“The truth is . . . thin slicing often delivers a better answer than more deliberate and exhaustive ways of thinking.”

“When our unconscious engages in thin slicing, what we are doing is an automated, accelerated unconscious version of. . . ”

The above quotations on the “theory of thin slices” from New York Times best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell are excerpts from his book Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking (2005), which explores the human mind through modern science and social psychology. Gladwell’s explication of the “theory of thin slices” precisely describes the essence of Michael Cherney’s Bounded By Mountains series; it also reflects the Chinese aesthetic of “seeing the grand within the small.”1

Memories of my first meeting with Michael Cherney are still quite vivid. It was as if he was a reflection of the subject matter in his long, narrow Bounded By Mountains album that he first shared with me: the footsteps and outline of a solitary walker, seen from behind, opening up into our chance encounter.

It was an autumn afternoon in sunny Los Angeles several years ago. I had only recently begun my teaching work at the University of California at Los Angeles when this young man made an appointment to visit me in my office and share his work. My first suspicion was that this would be yet another of the distractions that tend to come through the door of an art history professor at a renowned university. I grudgingly prepared to receive the guest, to give a cursory glance. Who would have imagined that the fascination that began on that day continues still?

Just like the solitary walker captured in his album V7, Cherney also carried a green, Chinese canvas bag. From within it this slender and gentle man carefully removed a traditional Chinese accordion-fold album and calmly began, page-by-page, to reveal the contents before me. My eyes lit up with the rhythm of the unfolding imagery, and I thought: “This Westerner has got something here.” I made a call to invite my colleague in ancient Chinese art and archaeology, Lothar van Falkenhausen, to join me in looking at the work. Immediately upon seeing the work Lothar began to praise it profusely, describing it as “extraordinary.”

3 7 I recall that the initial reason for Cherney’s visit was to ask my advice on whether or not and how he might incorporate calligraphy into his work. He delighted in talking about his studies in calligraphy and seal carving. At that time the album he showed was not yet in the final form it would take in the Bounded By Mountains series, but one could already see its fundamental potential; I therefore advised that although it was certainly helpful to learn calligraphy and seal carving, it was not necessary to add calligraphy to the work, let alone to add seals. Given that the work already possessed tremendous evocative richness, calligraphy or seals would be superfluous. More importantly, the work possessed a modern sense of abstraction and an elusiveness that should not be violated. At the time I was not sure if he took these frank suggestions to heart. In visits to follow, however, Cherney’s surprisingly quick progress earned my respect; his work evolved piece-by-piece, each living up to the promise offered by the first “blink” of viewing the world through “thin slices” and of my initial reaction to each work.

M i chael Chern e y, Untitled Album (H3 album), fully opened album and excerpt from the series Bounded By Mountains, 2 0 0 3 – 2 0 0 4 , p h o t o g raphs on x u a n p a p e r, 26 x 494 cm. Courtesy of the art ist.

M i chael Chern e y, Untitled A l b u m (H3 album), excerpt from the series Bounded By Mountains, 2 0 0 3 – 2 0 0 4 , p h o t o g raph on x u a n p a p e r, 26 x 19 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

38 M i c hael Chern e y, The Northern Song Spirit Road (S2 album), fully opened album and excerpt from the series Bounded By Mountains, 2 0 0 5 , p h o t o g raphs on x u a n p a p e r, 26 x 19 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

M i c hael Chern e y, The Mount Hua A l b u m (T4 album), fully opened album and excerpt from the series Bounded By Mountains, 2 0 0 5 , p h o t o g raphs on x u a n p a p e r, 26 x 19 cm. Courtesy of the artists.

Album V7 still remains fresh in my memory for a couple of reasons. First is the autobiographical nature of the subject matter, which deeply reflects the artist’s heart and mind. An experience that has affected him particularly strongly is that of “rebirth,” having overcome a life-threatening struggle with cancer at an early age. The solitary young man striding confidently forward is perhaps an unintentional metaphor, yet one that is uncontrived and valid nonetheless. Second is the creative format of Cherney’s work and the aesthetic experience that it evokes. As an example, allow me to return to my first experience with album V7. When the work was revealed page-by- page before me, my eyes immediately focused on the long, narrow composition; as the image rhythmically emerged like an animated picture, my pupils drifted about, zooming in and out of focus. At first it seemed hard to find a focal point; greyness and mottled imagery dominated my vision. Then objects began to take shape; upon discerning walking feet I understood the grey to

3 9 be the ground. I then made out a package, a canvas bag, a back, and a head, eventually revealing the entire rear view of a figure and buildings in the mid-ground, with the scene fading out into the high trees and electricity lines above and gradually disappearing into the endless void behind the branches. These sequentially superimposed images give the viewer an extraordinary three and, if one includes the aspect of time, four-dimensional viewing experience. There is both expectation and surprise. One cannot help but linger over the enchanting imagery.

The subject matter for album V7 as well as for all of the other albums that make up Cherney’s Bounded By Mountains series is drawn from the photographs he has taken during his travels in

China. What separates them from other, more common M i chael Chern e y, The Buried Crane Inscription (Y1 album), excerpt from the series Bounded By photographic work, however, is that each album contains only M o u n t a i n s , 2 0 0 5 , p h o t o g raph on x u a n p a p e r, 2 6 one thin slice of one single photograph. After digital conversion, x 19 cm. Courtesy of the artist. extreme enlargement, and compositional slicing, the images are printed page-by-page on xuan paper and mounted to form a traditional Chinese accordion style album Cherney clearly describes this in his own introduction to the Bounded By Mountains series:

Each album describes one enlarged slice of a single 35mm frame of film. The individual pages bring distinctiveness to various aspects of the panorama. When travelling among the mountain pages, one can get lost in detail. Rising above the peaks hints at something larger.2

These methods of production and mounting remind me of A Book from the Sky and its creator, Xu Bing.3 Cherney is an acquaintance of Xu Bing and admires him greatly. Thus Cherney’s use of an arcane album form to “make new wine using an old method” might have been inspired in part by Xu Bing’s work. Both artists also share a common trait: the meticulousness and deliberation that they apply to the creative process and to the overall presentation of their work can be likened to the concentrated rigour of the ascetic monk. Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky was meticulously carved and printed block-by-block; Cherney’s Bounded By Mountains collection was edited strip-by-strip and printed page-by-page with painstaking effort. Although this kind of creation and workmanship show the inventiveness of the artist, the actual theory and process are not all that complicated. The key is having a special eye for composing and editing the strips of images, which, whether vertical or horizontal, will look simple and spontaneous yet also alluring. I think this trait might be attributed in part to the deep influence of Cherney’s family, inherited from his renowned grandfather, Charles Hoff, whose creative spirit had an impact on the history of photography. More important are the experiences that have come about through Cherney’s years as a “son-in-law of China,” receptively immersed in Chinese sensibilities, surroundings, and culture.4

Cherney’s works travel horizontally and vertically through Chinese time and space, from the rivers, monks, and nomads of the Tibetan plateau (H2, H4, H5, and H8) to a woodcutter crossing a rope bridge in Sichuan (V9) and the grandeur of Mt. Hua in Shaanxi (T1 through T5); from the Buried Crane Inscription of ancient times (Y1) to the tender Buddha faces of the medieval grottoes of Dazu (H3), the solemn Northern Song Spirit Road (S1 and S2) in Henan province, and the ephemeral images of a transforming contemporary China. The artist is like a pilgrim, paying

40 M i c hael Chern e y, Untitled A l b u m (H8 album), excerpt from the series Bou nded By Mountains, p h o t o g raph on x u a n p a p e r, 26 x 19 cm. Courtesy of the artist. homage time and again, absorbing, extracting, and creating sporadic blinks and fragmentary truths in the kaleidoscopic space-time of China.

For a Chinese art historian, both the distinctive “sliced imagery” and format of Michael Cherney’s art are classical and modern at the same time. The imagery (or segments, or excerpts) resulting from the enlargement of slices shifts between the abstract and the concrete. The work thus possesses breathtaking charm and offers limitless imaginary space for the viewer. Especially the field of vision, alternately expanding and congealing as if presented through lenses of shifting focal lengths, becomes at once micro- and macrocosmic. This is what I refer to as the aesthetic experience derived from “the power of thin slicing,” as well as the essence of “seeing grandeur within the small” in traditional Chinese aesthetics. The only difference is that whereas traditionally in China “seeing the grand within the small” was associated with landscape painting, the subject matter of Cherney’s work is all encompassing, including figures and objects as well as scenery. Furthermore, the presentation of the work either horizontally or vertically via an accordion-fold album evokes a sense of combination and integration of the three basic forms of presentation and appreciation in traditional Chinese art: the horizontal hanging scroll, the vertical hanging scroll, and the album. One work, Buried Crane Inscription, is presented as a pair of vertical albums, and is thus a wonderful variation on the traditional calligraphy couplet (a pair of paper strips that contain a poem or phrase that are often hung anywhere from doorposts to temples). The three albums V4, V5, and V6 can be considered as three distinct albums or as a series: the long braid, the devotion in prayer, the burning red sticks of incense—each stirring on their own, yet together forming an exquisite triptych. Upon opening the horizontal Spirit Road and Mt. Hua albums, one realizes that the temporal and spatial structure as well as the aesthetic experience derived from the work is similar to that which one encounters in the classical landscape scroll. Yet Cherney’s ingenious editing skills allow the interplay of the varying levels of imagery—from extreme detail to full frame to full panorama—to shift between tangibility and elusiveness, and thus bring in a modern sensibility. Let us consider album S2, which represents the imperial tomb statuary of the Northern Song Spirit Road of Gong county in Henan, as an example. Stone figures and animals standing ancient watch over a wild field share alternating distances with the surrounding trees and landscape. While scanning through this album, one’s eyes constantly adjust their focus, sometimes drawn in close to individual stone statues, sometimes fading out to the fields and distant wood,

41 M i chael Chern e y, Untitled A l b u m (V7 album), excerpt from the series Bounded By Mountains, p h o t o g raph on x u a n p a p e r, 26 x 19 cm. Courtesy of t he artist.

42 intersecting and elusive, ebbing and flowing from page to page—like montage in film and su rrealism in painti n g. In tra n qu i l i ty and harm ony, a ll of the el em ents play toget h er in a sym ph ony of silent poetry. They rise here and fall there: melodious sound and meaning. Suddenly, near the end of the album, a modern motorcyclist bursts on to the scene, breaking the silence and bringing a dynamic crescendo to the piece. In this flash of a moment, a dialogue occurs between tradition and modernity in which they clash, overlap, and integrate in front of the eyes of the viewer.

Lastly, let us turn to the captivating images of contemporary China that pass through Cherney’s lens. Perhaps it is because he is a foreign voyager that he naturally possesses a detached and unique aesthetic sense toward China. Or maybe, like the phoenix of Chinese lore reborn from the ashes with the heavenly eye of enlightenment, Cherney’s bout with cancer and confrontation with his own mortality has led to a keen sense of observation which allows him not only to roam freely in the Chinese landscape and in the time and space of h i s tory, but also to excel at captu ring fascinati n g images of present-day China. From an old bicycle rider surrounded by vibrant wild flowers in the countryside (H6) to innocent village boys in a grassy field (H1) and from smiling Bodhisattvas (H3), carefree, red-robed monks (H4), and a long-braided peasant woman’s pious offering of incense (V4, V5, V6) to the striking wide-angle line of Tibetan faces inside a tent (H8), in the interplay of shadow and light there is a sense of loss as well as a sense of worldliness. In the flash of a moment each slice of imagery is a vivid portrait of China’s boundless diversity. And this colourful range of humanity, along with the actual mountains and rivers that flow within his lens, compose the movements of Bounded By Mountains.

And where does the true essence of Bounded By Mountains lie? It can be summed up by the words of Montaigne that led Cherney to the title of Bounded By Mountains:

What of a truth that is bounded by these mountains and is falsehood to the world that lives beyond? –Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Essays 2-12

As I write these words I am awakened to the meaning of the poetic lines of Jia Dao (793–865), who describes the whereabouts of the Daoist master picking herbs: “He is in these mountains, but the clouds are so thick, who knows where?”5 Reaching that moment where words must come to an end, the equally famous lines of Wang Wei (701–761) flash through my mind:

The river flows out beyond Heaven and Earth, The color of the mountains, half there, half not there.6

Notes 1 Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (New York: Little, Brown, 2005) 23, 34. See chapter 1, “The Theory of Thin Slices.” For the theory of “seeing the grand within the small,” see Susan Bush, The Chinese Literati on Painting: Su Shih (1037–1101) to Tung Ch’i-ch’ang (1555–1636) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971). 2 See Michael Cherney’s Web site: http://www.qiumai.net/scj/indexe.html. 3 For Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky, see Britta Erickson, Words Without Meaning, Meaning Without Words: The Art of Xu Bing (Washington, D.C., and Seattle: A. M. Sackler Gallery and University of Washington Press, 2001). 4 Michael Cherney’s grandfather, Charles Hoff, was a renowned photographer for the New York Daily News. Hoff’s legacy comprises primarily sports photography, and the most striking of his photographs are of boxers. The invention of stroboscopic and flash lighting by Hoff and his colleagues allowed Hoff to transform portraits of athletes into radical figure studies. Hoff’s most famous photograph was of the explosion of the zeppelin Hindenburg at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937. Michael Cherney majored in East Asian studies at university and over the years has continued intensive study of Chinese language and culture; his marriage to Chinese-born Dong Huang Cherney makes him a true son-in-law of China. 5 Jia Dao, “Searching, and Not Finding, the Hermit.” See Yu Ding Quan Tang Shi, volume 574, 22. (The full poem reads, “Beneath the pines I asked the boy, the master’s gone in search of medicine, he is in these mountains, but the clouds are so thick, who knows where?”) 6 Wang Wei, “Upon Sailing the Han River.” See Stephen Owen, Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics: Omen of the World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 75.

4 3 oɴe pe ʀ s o ɴ’s cʟassɪcs of mouɴtaɪɴ aɴd sea: oɴ qɪɴ ʏufeɴ aɴd ʜeʀ ɪɴsta ʟ ʟ atɪoɴ aʀt

ʙɪɴɢʏɪ ʜua ɴ ɢ

Qin Yu f e n , Floating Boat, i n s t a l l a t i o n , 2004. Courtesy of the University of Buffalo Art Galleries.

The gallery is wide open, but few feel the urge to walk in. In this vast and sunny space, Floating Boat, Qin Yufen’s installation, feels oddly suffocating. Strangely, the Lightwell Gallery at the University of Buffalo becomes all at once empty and occupied, isolated and accessible, specific and abstract. Numerous threads hang from the ceiling, with each anchoring a transparent “boat” about 3 by 4 inches in size. The transcendental materiality of the work draws me into a closer view. Here, I realize that the boats are made of the disposable masks we usually find at a dental clinic. I also hear a mysterious sound composed of many voices. They are not exactly musical, but revealing, whining, sighing, as if someone is telling a story not expected to be understood.

This work resonates not only with me, but also in the work of others, such as in the writing of Wallace Stevens, who penned a rather humorous piece in 1922 entitled “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman”:

Proud of such novelties of the sublime, Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk, May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves. A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.1

If S tevens is asserting that rel i g ious rh etoric has no high er meaning than on e’s priva te imagi n a ti on , Qin, on the other hand, notes that no conceptual, philosophical, or political discourse can replace one’s fictional or emotional attachment to, and elaboration of, life as oneness. Simply put, the most powerful interpretation of Qin Yufen’s art is one’s physical encounter with her work. Neither gender nor Asian philosophy can fully represent Qin’s essential curiosity. She is a keen observer of the broader human condition, but she also declines to present a superficial dramatization of social

44 issues such as identity and globalism. In her art, Qin Yufen raises a fundamental question for all critics; namely, how can we read materialized artistic expression in critical terms that are not limited by aesthetic beauty or simplistic cultural symbolism? This inquiry will serve as the backdrop of this essay. It traces the development of Qin as an artist through an analysis of various visual and artistic strategies the artist has formulated over the years. It also discusses Qin’s contribution to the early development of installation art in China and Europe in the late 1980s and 1990s. Through reading her provocative shifts between reminiscence and myth and her staging of a superfluous simplicity, we gradually approach a broader understanding of the evolution of contemporary art practice in both Chinese and Western societies. pɪctuʀe fʀame: eaʀʟʏ wo ʀ k Qin became involved with the early Chinese avant-garde movement through participating in the activities of the influential No Name School (Wuminghuapai). Founded by Zhao Wenliang and Yang Yushu in the early 1970s, No Name School developed the earliest significant discourse in China to concentrate on the notion of abstract painting. Qin was one of the few women members of the group. Her senior colleague Ma Kelu noted that Qin’s precise control of composition and colour resonates with the style of Robert Motherwell.2 Qin’s early paintings can certainly be addressed in such formalist terms. However, her most significant concern was not simply to compose beautiful pictures or to achieve subtle colour modulations. She was inspired more by the potential for a two-dimensional space to develop into a three-dimensional one. In his critique of Minimalism, Michael Fried argues that its theatricality finds expression in an anthropomorphism that constitutes a breaking point between formalist painting and the later movement into installa- tion.3 In comparison, Qin Yufen placed emphasis on the notion of experience, even more so than performance. To Qin, the singularity of the picture frame itself became anthropomorphic, which is both culturally alive and personally telling. In 1986, Qin Yufen left Beijing for Germany with her husband Zhu Jinshi. Prior to her departure, she had developed a number of ideas for installation projects, but it was only in Berlin that she began to create the physical reality of these proposals.

Qin Yufen and her early abstract paintings. Courtesy of the artist.

4 5 Qin Yu f e n , Negative Print, i n s t a l l a t i o n , 1988. Courtesy of the artist.

In 1988, the year before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Qin installed Negative Print (Yinwen). At that historical moment, Qin lived near the Berlin Wall, and in her daily strolls around the city as a newcomer, she found Berlin surreal. She experienced an alienation that was generated by various ruptures in her life relating to history, time, language, and personal destiny. The local newspaper was the only way for her to acquire information from the outside, but somehow, it also disconnected her from it. Therefore, in Negative Print she decided to use a combination of newspapers from Berlin and rice paper from China. In the Western pictorial tradition, the picture frame is defined by stretcher bars and wall spaces, hence setting up physical parameters for the composition, subject matter, and, more importantly, the autonomous space of art and art history. The Chinese classical practice fashions the picture frame through a different approach. The idea of mounting a work of art is a tangible and elastic process. The rice paper is usually mounted onto another layer of rice paper; then later a layer of silk brocade envelops the mounted picture. As a result, the mounted painting is never finalized by one form, size, or presentation. Each rolling out of the scroll varies, and thus each viewing varies. In Negative Print, Qin brushes liquid glue behind the blank ri ce paper so that her stro kes and ge s tu res su rf ace on the mounted “ i m a ge .” She mounted numerous layers of rice paper and newspaper onto the wall. In the end, her painting was only a negative expression and ultimately existed as null. The installation disappeared during the process of its making.

More than a remark on the sharp contrast between two cultural traditions, Negative Print exposes an innate tension between the two-dimensional picture plane and the execution of a three-dimen- sional work. While a picture is framed and “contained” by its mounting, here the very act of the mounting of the picture becomes the picture itself. Is the notion of “frame” ever a genuine embodiment of the stability of art’s autonomy? Or is it the ultimate expression of objecthood? The idea of Yinwen came from the stone carving and rubbing tradition. Historically, the Chinese used rubbings from stone carvings to “frame” the original writing. However, there is a paradox embedded in this practice. The original writing is presumably preserved in the carving, as stone is considered permanent. The rubbing in fact reverses this process. The question becomes whether the negative print (a two-dimensional image) can contain the stone carving (a three-dimensional execution) and still maintain an intimate connection to the two-dimensional writing. In Negative

4 6 Qin Yu f e n , Marriage Chamber, i n s t a l l a t i o n , 1992. Courtesy of the artist.

Print, if the rice paper indicates a displacement of history, the local newspaper in the German language seems to complicate the matter by hinting at an additional element of displacement.

Around the time Qin made this work, a number of important artists in Beijing were working with the idea of mounting and traditional pictorial forms. Among their work are striking examples such as Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky (1988) and Wu Shanzhuan’s Big Character Banners (1989). While both artists were working with these historical forms and social formats, Qin seems at that time to have departed from that specific content or subject matter and to have begun to devise a more detached method of contemplation.

In her 1992 installation Marriage Chamber (Guifang), Qin employed a more resolved visual language. The idea of picture frame was replaced by a mythology of things and a sensuality that was both mundane and provocative. The installation was conceived with three kinds of objects: two wash stands, two sets of diaphanous mosquito nets, and a Chinese ceramic vase. What defines the physical reality of the work, or the “frame,” are the wash stands—evidence of modernity and industrialization—while the mosquito nets structure an abstract interior that is both gendered and cultured. Although today Kunst-Werke has become one of the most important galleries in Berlin featuring contemporary art, Qin recalls that fourteen years ago when she exhibited the work, the space was semi-abandoned and still contaminated by the smell of dead fish from its original function as a storehouse for seafood. The laboured process of mounting exemplified in Negative Print was now translated into the simple touch of hanging. Nevertheless, the power of the “frame” remains: a soft and simple structure manages to transform a vulnerable and tangible material into a sculpturalized fantasy. The artist no longer dwells on the relationship between the “image” and the “thing,” or between “art” and “history.” Now she has begun to navigate an allegory that is entirely her own. Critics have elaborated on the fantastic and utopian quality evident in Qin’s art and have argued that much of her “paradise” was derived from her experience in China as a young woman struggling to come to terms with turmoil and various difficulties.4 Nonetheless, Marriage Chamber seems to be detached from the specificity of Qin’s biography. The washstands allude to the passing of time, since the process of “drying” implies a gradual evaporation of water and, possibly, memory. In contrast, the vase appears to be a quiet receptor and container of time,

47 Qin Yu f e n , Yu t a n g ch u n, i n s t a l l a t i o n , 1994. Courtesy of the artist. events, and violence. The tension that arises between the subtleties of these common objects is maximized by the bareness of the environment itself. Three years after the fall of the Berlin wall, this install a ti on evo ked the mem ory of death and dec ay (the fish smell ) , the difficult and sen s a ti on a l confrontation of two social systems, and the antagonism that accompanied such friction.

1 9 9 4 – 2 0 0 1: tʜe ʏeaʀs of supe ʀ f ʟuous mɪɴɪmaʟɪsm 1994 was an unusual year. There are a few factors that might have contributed to the impressive burst in Qin’s creativity. The first was the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart inviting her to participate in an exhibition entitled Logo of Body. The second had to do with Qin’s return to China the previous year, at which time she was able to realize the first large-scale installation, completed in Wanzhuang, a suburban village near Beijing. That project featured a total of six hundred fans planted in a man-made pond. The third was related to her job as a technician at a dental clinic,

4 8 which allowed her to more clearly under- stand the social environment in Berlin. Qin, all of sudden, became increasingly exposed to the memory of her youth, to contemporary German society, and to the European art scene.

ʏ u ta ɴ ɢ c ʜ u ɴ: ʙ e tweeɴ peʀfoʀmaɴce aɴd aʀt The title of Qin’s installation in the open courtyard of the National Gallery in Berlin is Yutangchun. A total of one hundred and twenty-three washing lines were placed in a serene sequence. On each line hung various layers of rice paper. Between the layers were hidden six hun- dred and forty-eight speakers. In the vast open space designed by British architect James Sterling, Qin located a stage, the picture frame that she had been searching out for decades. Two features made this Qin Yu f e n , 100 Meters, i n s t a l l a t i o n , 1994. Courtesy of th e artist. piece striking in terms of her personal development. One was the impressive application of seriality, the other was her sophisticated use of sound. This was one of the most melodious installations of her early career. In the discourse of the Western contemporary art, the dichotomy of music vs. art has been long lasting. Some have focused on the difference between the two domains in arguing for the “autonomy” of visual experience, while others, such as Clement Greenberg, reinforce the similarity between music and formalist art to argue for the absoluteness of formalism. Qin Yufen’s installation, however, was based on a daring proposal: that is, it is not only music, but also the physical embodiment of music (the speakers), that can be composed into a coherent theatricality.5 Therefore, music and art “visually” became one in this installation. Such an ambiguous approach complicated the issue of theatricality because the mind’s eye could no longer experience the difference between the stage and the experience of the stage. In this scenario, the picture frame (whether determined by the open courtyard or the seriality of the stands) lost its temporal stability and, therefore, did not suggest a beginning or an end to the theatricality. Hence, the border between performance and art was blurred, if not broken down. The provocative nature of this installation can be juxtaposed with the classical Chinese pictorial tradition—if we can compare music to writing, that is. In Yutangchun, such comparison is especially meaningful because the music was based on a recording of lyrics sung by the female protagonist of the Beijing opera classic Yutangchun. The traditional Chinese picture frame is usually a balanced collaboration of writing (a literary voice) and painting (a visual image). In addition, it is not only the abstract meaning of the two, but also the physical parameters of the two that have to be integrated into one act. Taking this tradition as a philosophical idea and an aesthetic pre-condition, Qin employs this principle as the foundation of her mythmaking. She presents a super-reality in which all senses lose conventional barriers and sequence of priority.

The surrealism implicit in Qin’s storytelling cannot be bound to one specific story. Nevertheless, her approach seems to recall her youth in Beijing with a profound sense of detachment. Qin came

49 of age during the Cultural Revolution. As a teenager, she worked at a factory making industrial parts for large machinery. Thus, in an indirect way, she encountered the aesthetics of Minimalism: industrial materials, serialized placement, and minimal and repetitive gestures. However, Qin feels that Minimalism does not possess the strong tension that it portends to evoke in the face of history and society. Instead, she attributes an emotional content and an externalization of sentiment and melancholia to these objects. In terms of execution, she often covers the industrial- ized objects with sensual and vulnerable material and adds narrative through the use of sound. During the early 1990s, Qin developed another material strategy that was to emerge as one of her fundamental visual strategies. Gravity, or, the natural tendency exerted by a celestial body, such as the earth, became her ultimate expression of myth-making. feɴɢʜe: ɢʀav ɪ t ʏ as ʀememʙʀa ɴ c e If in Marriage Chamber and Yutangchun gravity is a straightforward application of a natural tendency, an enactment of a universal law, in Fenghe (1994), gravity becomes a perpetual question of the possibility of remembrance. In the quietness that was framed by the lotus pond and the wind, Qin uttered her pensive contemplation on issues of social change and urbanization: How much memory can one sustain, and to what extent can one fully possess that memory? Furthermore, how can one come to terms with change that is so drastic that reality turns into only one version of transient history? The idea for Fenghe came from Qin’s Wanzhuang project of 1993, the year after Deng Xiaoping’s speech announcing the final privatization of the national economy. This installation took place in the moment prior to Beijing’s daunting and difficult struggle with demolition and industrialization. By floating ten thousand pan-leaf fans in the lotus pond, Qin suspended temporal experience within a space where gravity usually implies downward movement. The deferral of gravitational forces by the density of the water seemed to generate an illusion of time. Furthermore, the installation reversed the drying process of the pan leaf during the making of the fans by equating a desiccated an organic form (the fans) to the living entities of lotus petals in the lake. Through Qin’s melancholic gaze, the dreamy Imperial garden, the Garden of Harmony and Peace, is seen here as a mysterious ruin from the past, even though it appears to be blossoming with the most glorious beauty. tʜe weʟʟ: ɢʀav ɪ t ʏ as ʟɪteʀa ʀʏ aʟʟu s ɪ o ɴ In 1998, Qin installed her most distilled project driven by gravity. Her installation 100 Meters consisted only of one stream of white silk cascading into a well located in a cloister. The absence of detail, the purity of the material, and the lack of manipulation contributed to the elements of abstraction in the work. Visually and physically, it is the aspect of gravity that connects this piece to Yutangchun. However, there is another dimension to the interconnectedness between these two pieces. In the music of Yutangchun, Qin chooses a piece of oration expressing the lead character’s sorrow upon her execution. The lyrics read:

Susan is leaving Hongtong County for execution, Stumbling along the street with sorrow . . . If you are departing for Najian, Can you send my loved one my last words . . . In my next life I will return his love.

Hence, Yutangchun is about the struggle with life and death and the separation of two loved ones by space and time. The well, on the other hand, resonates with the idiom beijinglixiang, which literally means that one leaves her native place as she leaves her well behind. The connection between the two installations is reinforced by the symbolism of white silk and its association with death. In other words, the monumental descent of the white silk indicates that only in death may

50 one find love and home, which constitutes a powerful sub-reading of Yutangchun. With an u n d erstanding of Q i n’s pers onal history, it seems conven i ent to re ad 100 Meters a utobi ogra ph i c a lly. Yet such a reading is limited, because the significance of 100 Meters is that which emerges through the unexpected convergence of water and silk; the artist manages to address difficult philosophical notions such as the idea of “homelessness” under the pressure of globalization. f ʟ e e tɪɴɢ ʙoats: ɢ ʀ av ɪ t ʏ as pʀo pʜecʏ In 1996, Qin arranged three thousand disposable facial masks and two hundred and forty speakers into an ocean of floating boats at the Sprengel Museum, Hannover. Compared to mainstream artists working at the time in Europe, Qin was distinct in her avoidance of any obvious reference to identity politics or social discourse. Floating Boat is Qin Yu f e n , F e n g h e, i n s t a l l a t i o n , 1994. Courtesy of the artist. prob a bly her most repre s en t a ti on a l and figurative project of this period. The masks alluded to the physicality of the human body, a body that is conditioned by fear and ailment. The installation also evoked street scenes in Beijing where people wear face masks due to the cruel winter climate. In its simple and straightforward presentation, Floating Boat appeared to be a strange prophecy about the unknown future of the world, on some unexpected development that may arise or a parable told in the past. In the spring of 2004, such a prophecy was manifested with the outbreak of SARS. For weeks, photographs of people wearing white masks flooded the news media around the world. However, evidence of such photojournalism disappeared altogether a few months later, as if the epidemic never struck the city of Beijing. In November 2004, Qin decided to reinstall the project in the Lightwell Gallery at University of Buffalo, which in turn transformed the prophecy into an epitaph, a quiet crystallization of both the possibility and the documentation of a catastrophe.

ʀeceɴt woʀks 2002–2006: fa ʙ ʀ ɪ c atɪoɴ aɴd ʀemɪɴɪsceɴce The year 2001 was a turning point for Qin and for the rest of the world. The most obvious shift in her focus was that she became more concerned about social concerns and human conflicts. She was especially observant of the rising nationalistic sentiment in German society. Projects such as her Beautiful Violence (2001) at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh and Making Paradise (2002) at Hamburger Bahnhof testify to this shift. Yet the most effective project during this period was The Roles of Lovers of 2006, a work created in memory of the German playwright Heiner Müller. In Lovers, the commemoration of a particular individual was positioned within a philosophical realm between fabrication and documentation. It departed from her earlier pristine, minimalist, and harmonious aesthetic, and moved into a strange mixture of brutality and fantasy. Her classic and graceful embodiments of natural forces were replaced by a gestural arrangement of various forms, fabrics, colours, and textures, all of which had an ambiguous tension with each other. Furthermore, the seriality of her previous installations gave way to the specificity of spatial and temporary relationships. In the scene of the “King,” the memory of the physical presence of one person was fragmented into the parts of a destroyed sewing machine, the body parts of dolls placed on a ceramic tabletop, and the messy display of various organic forms hovering over the

51 Qin Yu f e n , Roles of Lov e r s , “ K i n g ” and “ R o m a n c e ” s c e n e s , i n s t a l l a t i o n , 2006. Courtesy of the A r t i s t

floor. The sense of “Romance,” on the other hand, was literalized by the poem written by Müller’s wi fe , wh i ch was em broi dered on the blue tabl ecl o t h . Hen ce , on the su rf ace , the acti on of m a s c u l i n e power con tra s ted with the qu i etness of a feminine space . Non et h el e s s , s i n ce the scene of the “ Ki n g” was based on Müller’s play, the masculine space remained fictional and manipulated, whereas the scene of “Romance” was biographical, the interaction between the man and the woman one that indeed did take place. If this subtle subversion represents an internal logic coordinating politics and culture, Qin’s interpretation can be read as a bold investigation into the balance and battle between a global political structure that is increasingly aggressive and a cultural practice that is both assertive and impotent.

ʀ e tuʀɴɪɴɢ to tʜe 1980s In 1985, Qin published a private and thoughtful essay on the notion of abstract painting, in which she wrote:

In painting I have found a life, an existence or an act, in hope [of] transcend[ing] mundane reality. In each new image, a new world is given life and birth. In th[is] new world, I search for my own narrative and linguistics. This world is simultaneously estranged yet familiar. This world gives me a home to return to.6

Twenty years later, this statement still stands as the best testimony to her art practice.

Notes 1 See Milton J. Bates, Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self (San Francisco: University of California Press, 1985), 122. 2 See Ma Kelu, Wumingniandai, unpublished manuscript, booklet 2, 5–6. 3 See Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood," Artforum (1967): 5, 12–23. 4 See Hou Hanru’s informative essay “Making a Paradise—Some Guess at Qin Yufen’s work,” in Qin Yufen (Berlin: Wasmuth, 2001), 12–17, esp. 15. 5 For a summary, see Rosalind Krauss, “The Photographic Tradition of Surrealism,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 87–118. 6 From Qin Yufen’s 1984 manuscript “The Language that I Choose—Abstract Painting,” 2, unpublished.

52 k ɴ ow ʟ e d ɢe aɴd ɪʟʟusɪoɴ: oɴ ʜoɴɢ ʜao’s ʀeceɴt wo ʀ k s c ʜ ʀ ɪ st ɪ ɴa ʏ ü

Hong Hao, M exico Huun A m a t e, 2 0 0 4 , paint on hahnemuhle paper, P l exiglas case. Courtesy of Chambers Fine A r t , New Yo r k .

When I first saw Hong Hao’s Mexico Huun Amate (2004), I was puzzled. It is an opened book enclosed in a Plexiglas frame, but the pages are blank. It is only with close and careful observation that some fine fibres are revealed on the surface of the pages. The book seems thick, with the edges of the rest of the pages sliding down on both sides. The other side of the book is almost exactly the same. And the title does not tell much about the work either. When I looked at the upper edge of the book I burst into laughter—I realized that what I saw was not a book, but an illusion of a book created by two pieces of paper. Each piece of paper is folded at the middle, and its left and right borders are glued to the edges of the other. Two pieces of a paper stacked one millimetre thick are attached at the left and right ends of the open pages. The hollow spaces near the spine of the “book” and situated between the two pieces of paper are the only evidence that what I saw is not a book but instead a representation of a book. This deception is further enhanced by the texture of the pages—Mexico Huun Amate is the name of the type of paper that Hong Hao has used, but not exactly. The fine fibres of the paper were carefully delineated by the artist, thread by thread, on the surface of the blank pages. Although only four pages from the book are presented for inspection, the illusion of a thicker volume is achieved.

This work immediately calls to mind Hong Hao’s famous Selected Scriptures series of silkscreens, for the sculpture is almost a three-dimensional version of those prints. Selected Scriptures includes thirty-seven individual pieces, each representing, or creating, the illusion of an open page from a thick book. The layered paper edges are similar to those in Mexico Huun Amate in that they also create the illusion of a thick book that is opened. However, instead of being glued on the pages, they are part of a two-dimensional simulation. The illusionistic effect is also achieved through the

5 3 intentional rendering of water stains on slightly worn papers.

Hong Hao started the series in the late 1980s with the ultimate goal of creating an encyclopedia. Each page of this encyclopedia was to be designed in an open format in order to provide the viewer a direct visual encounter with the contents. He intended the encyclopedia to include a vast amount of information and to cover a wide range of topics. For example, on the already completed pages one finds images of world maps with the names of countries exchanged or their sizes altered according to their level of economic power, symbols of recent political events such as the episodes of the eight model theatre pieces from the Cultural Revolution, diagrams of acupuncture, and depictions of the ancient Chinese text The Art of War Hong Hao, P y r amid Books: Beauty as Jade, 2 0 0 4 , printed paper, g l u e. Cour tesy of Chambers Fine A r t , New Yo r k . (Sunzi binfa). Texts, both in Chinese and in English, also appear on the pages, although most of them are devoid of any meaning. Hong Hao humorously interjects these nonsensical texts with randomly selected images from traditional and contemporary cultures of China and the West, creating witty commentaries on the arbitrariness of one’s acquisition and organization of information and knowledge.

For the viewer, looking at the prints becomes a game. There is the challenge to recognize the visual and textual information included on each print and to decipher the meaning of their random juxtaposition. Because of their visual complexity and their physical semblance to a book, the prints create the illusion of an encyclopedia, but no such book exists. They are imitations with no models, merely simulacra imagined by the artist. Just as the rendering of book pages are illusions, the knowledge contained within them is also an illusion. It does not have any real meaning or substance.

Hong Hao’s fascination with the relationship between knowledge and the illusion of knowledge perhaps can be best explained by his work Pyramid Books (2004). It consists of a pair of sculptural books (House of Gold and Beauty as Jade) that express the artist’s understanding of knowledge in Chinese society since ancient times. The well-known Chinese proverb “In books there are houses of gold and beauty as jade” dates back at least as far as the Ming dynasty (1368–1664). Pyramid Books is a sarcastic comment on the Confucian teaching that places high value on intellectuals and scholars who were able to achieve official advancement (and thus the wealth and happiness symbolized by the two books respectively) through learning. Hong’s two sculptural books symbol- ize that the Chinese respect knowledge, but not without an ultimate reward, namely the acquisi- tion of wealth symbolized by a house of gold and love symbolized by a woman beautiful as jade.

5 4 This time, instead of being in the physical shape of a book, each of the sculptures is in the form of a pyramid created out of pages that gradually increase in size. The pages are again carefully bound together with glue, with one millimeter distance between each page. Each page can be read separately, and when the books are closed they are complete sculptural objects. House of Gold consists mainly of text, with its table of contents borrowed from a vintage copy of Chairman Mao’s Red Book. Beauty as Jade consists mainly of images, as a beautiful woman is always praised to be “as beautiful as jade and as beautiful as a painting.” The arrangement of the page sequences is carefully planned, not to complete a story or to provide visual compar- isons, but to provoke eeriness with its awkward juxtaposition of unrelated materials. The randomly placed pages Hong Hao, P y r amid Books: House of Gold, 2 0 0 4 , printed paper, g l u e. Courtesy of Chambers Fine A r t , New Yo r k . construct an artificial relationship— ironically, a relationship of being unrelated. Such awkwardness and artificiality is the artist’s comment on a somewhat blind, absurd trust in books, knowledge, and authority in Chinese culture. While books can provide knowledge and perhaps even success and happiness, they can also be the source of misunderstanding and illusion.

The illusion of a book or the illusory format of a book is further developed in other three-dimen- sional sculptures by Hong Hao. The History of Contemporary Art (2004) has old, stained pages similar to those found in the Selected Scriptures series. Its title also suggests a broad approach to the con tent of the boo k . The immed i a te differen ce , h owever, lies in the tra n s form a ti on it repre s en t s from the two-dimensional silkscreen prints created in earlier years to three-dimensional sculpture. More importantly, though, is the disparity between the content found in the two artworks. In the prints, Hong Hao tried to include as much information as possible. The sculptural book, on the other hand, in which Hong Hao glued together all the pages, has no accessible content, or has whatever content the viewer imagines it to possess.

Hong Hao purchased a thick Russian-Chinese dictionary from a second-hand bookstore and covered it with a newly designed jacket printed with the title History of Contemporary Art. As Hong Hao put his own name on the book jacket in place of the original author’s, he is suggesting that any introduction to contemporary art is bound to be a personal interpretation. Yet by gluing the pages of the book together, he simultaneously eliminated any possible trace of an author’s interpretation of contemporary art, again leaving space for the viewer’s imagination. In the absence of actual images and texts, the viewer can freely apply to the book his or her own knowledge of contemporary art, thus creating a subjective account of its history.

5 5 Contemporary Photography (2004) is a pair of vintage books dating from the Cultural Revolution that are covered with glossy, newly designed jackets. The original illustrations of the orderly and seemingly prosperous China that was promoted in that era of Chinese history, as archaic as they may look to us today, are nonethe- less representative of the most Hong Hao, My T h i n g s, 2 0 0 2 - 0 4 , colour photograph of scanned images. Courtesy of Chambers Fine A r t , New Yo r k . typical art forms and photography created during the period. The new glossy jackets imitate cover designs of current fashion periodicals, updating the vintage books with a contemporary disguise. The red colour of the jackets is directly borrowed from the covers of the original books, which were published at a time when red was considered a revolutionary colour, as exemplified in the famous saying “the East is red.” By covering history with contemporary design and giving the vintage books the new name of Contemporary Photography, Hong Hao not only mixes the past with the present, but again challenges our knowledge and understanding of history.

To create the illusion of the real, meticulous labour and precise technique is important in all of Hong Hao’s artworks. The My Things series (2004) includes photographs produced from scanning objects that Hong Hao owns or used to own but has since lost. Instead of taking pictures of these objects, Hong Hao puts them on a scanner and scans the objects in their original sizes. He then digitally arranges the scanned images into compositions. Each photograph in the series has a theme. One features art-related books in the artist’s collection. Among other topics are identity papers from different stages of the artist’s life and different currencies the artist collected during his travels to va rious co u n tries in the process of ex h i bi ting his art work s . The gl o s s y, h i gh - re s o l uti on printing of each photograph contrasts sharply with the mundane objects it includes. These seemingly trivial objects and their remarkable diversity reflect the great changes taking place in people's daily lives amid the social and economic transformation of China today. Hong Hao’s down-to-earth approach and unique view on space and time are ingrained in this series, and, like a religious practitioner doing his daily duties in a ritual fashion, the artist rigorously and mechanically scans what would be otherwise insignificant articles. Discarding narrative, the My Things series looks like a day-to-day account of ordinary matters. However, as such objects are accumulated, the indelible mark of Hong Hao's own existence manifests itself. And far from being the product of narcissism or fetishism, this series is the artist's way of directly, and in a controlled manner, representing the concept of time and existence. What permeates the series is an introspective humanism that transcends the value of an individual’s ego. Viewing these images, the viewer can relive the past and revive some of the common experiences buried deep both in one’s memory and in collective unconsciousness.

Why are books so important to Hong Hao and his art creation? Francis Bacon’s famous idiom “knowledge is power” (zhishi jiushi liliang) is the slogan Hong Hao used for his solo exhibition held at Chambers Fine Art in New York in 2004. It perhaps can explain his deep interest in the relationship between book, knowledge, and (illusory) power. For this exhibition, he transformed the entire gallery space into a reading room and created an installation named Newsstand (2004)

5 6 providing a place for the vi ewer to re ad books and maga z i n e s . One part of the install a ti on inclu ded five pairs of magazines placed on a stand, their contents relating to various topics such as art, women, weapons, and business. Each pair consisted of one English version and one Chinese version, but Hong Hao skillfully exchanged the covers of the two, creating magazines with contents and language that were misleading. In accordance with his theme of illusion, Hong Hao created a magazine stand that appeared to offer viewers a special place to read and learn about current events and trends, but the deceptive covers caused instead perplexity and disorder.

Another series of books included in this deceptive reading room was Oahgnoh Biennale: Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte (2001–2004). Once again using the book format, in this case the format of catalogues for international art biennials, the Oahgnoh Biennale series comments on the strongly enthusiastic reaction to art biennials in recent years, something perpetuated by the catalogues published to accompany them. With irony and humour, Hong Hao reversed his own name and created his own versions of international art biennial publications. The layout of the catalogues closely follows those of the official published ones, including preface, table of contents, chapter sections, and bibliography. Although on the surface the books appear to be official exhibition catalogues, they are in fact composed of pages from about one hundred magazines randomly selected by the artist from newsstands and flea markets in Beijing over the past ten years. The contents of the magazines range from entertainment and news to military hardware and art. The arrangement of the pages is carefully planned in order to avoid any coherent sequence. As in Pyramid Books, the pages are juxtaposed in unrelated sequences, challenging our understanding of the function and meaning of contemporary art and contempo- rary art exhibitions.

In the completed five volumes of the Oahgnoh Biennale catalogue, Hong Hao tried to use as many original magazine pages as possible. However, sometimes the pages would not fit the catalogue dimensions. In such cases he would then enlarge or shrink them as required on a photocopier. The layout of the magazines used were also different, and, in order to keep them consistent, Hong Hao would omit or alter the designs as well as Hong Hao, N e w s s t a n d, 2 0 0 4 , installation. Courtesy of Chambers Fine A r t , New Yo r k . renumber each page. Occasionally, he also concealed the name of an author in order to challenge the relationship between copyright and knowledge. As the pages have been so manipulated by the artist, the question arises as to whether they still represent authenticity or whether they are only an illusion of authenticity.

The first catalogue from the series is dedicated to the year 1997, and its cover design is inspired by the 1997 Venice Biennale catalogue. 1997 is a year that holds special significance in Hong Hao’s artistic career. Together with the artist Yan Lei, Hong Hao created a counterfeit invitation to exhibit at Documenta and sent a copy of the fake invitation to many well-known Chinese artists. In later comments regarding this “performance,” Hong Hao said he sent the Documenta invitation to reflect on how too many Chinese artists measure success by their participation in international art biennials and festivals. In his opinion, invitations to show in international exhibitions should not be seen as the only criterion to evaluate an artist and his or her artworks.

57 To conclude this brief analysis of Hong Hao’s recent works and their relationship between knowledge and illusion, I want to use the example of The History of Modern Art (2004). The piece consists of two vintage editions of the same book—The History of Modern Art by H. H. Arnason— one in English and one in Chinese trans- lation. This classic English textbook was translated into Chinese and published in Hong Hao, Oahgnoh Biennale: Esposizione Inter nazionale d’ A r t e , 2 0 0 3 – 0 4 , b o u n d 1983. It was the first academic book h a r d c ove r books. Courtesy of Chambers Fine A r t , New Yo r k . published in China that introduced the development of modern art in the West from the nineteenth century to the early 1970s. The Chinese translation added “Western” to the book’s title, accurately narrowing the subject of the book to the history of Western modern art. Hong Hao, as a young art student eager to learn about art outside the classroom, bought the book and studied the images and texts carefully. For Hong Hao and his generation, this was the textbook that opened their minds and introduced a series of new forms and visual language. The book was published in China at a time when art was just beginning to be liberated from the strict regulations established during the Cultural Revolution.

When Hong Hao came to New York in 2004, he saw the original English edition of The History of Modern Art for the first time in his life. This encounter had a particular historical meaning to the artist. In his version of The History of Modern Art, Hong Hao carefully overlaps each page, one on top of the other, from the Chinese edition and the English edition. Hong Hao, The Histor y of Modern A r t , 2 0 0 4 , t wo vintage editions of H. H. A rn a s o n , The now inseparable relationship between The History of Modern A r t . Courtesy of Chambers Fine A r t , New Yo r k . the two books is symbolically represented by the interleaved pages, provoking the viewer to reflect upon the inseparable relationship between the art of China and the West. Now, contemporary Chinese artists are regularly participating in international art exhibitions and have become part of the global art movement. In this sense, the book is a witness to the development of contemporary art in China over the last two decades. If twenty years ago, Hong Hao’s knowledge of, and relationship with, international contemporary art was mediated through the Chinese translation of text and reproductions of images in H. H. Arnason’s book, today he is an active member participating in the making of “the history of modern art.”

Notes 1 During the Cultural Revolution, only eight “model” pieces (yangban) were allowed to play in theatres, and the same eight stories were per formed in many different formats, including ballets, operas, movies, and others.

5 8 sʜɪ jɪɴsoɴɢ: ɴa zʜa ʙaʙʏ ʙoutɪqu e joʜɴ ta ɴ coc k

Shi Jinsong, Na Zha Stroller, 2 0 0 5 , stainless steel. Courtesy of Chambers Fine A r t , New Yo r k .

Shi Jinsong’s studio in the Factory 798 district in Beijing comes as a surprise to those who visit him there for the first time. Although he lives most of the time in Wuhan, he is more accessible to visitors in Beijing, as few travellers venture as far as Wuhan. Located off one of the long, gloomy corridors that serve as main thoroughfares through the decaying factory buildings in Factory 798, it is the lair of a bricoleur, littered with found objects dismantled to varying degrees and hastily assembled maquettes for his own hybrid sculptural forms in different states of development and disrepair. From this clutter emerges a range of gleaming stainless-steel objects—baby strollers and other baby products, work stations, and futuristic tractors—that are simultaneous beguiling and terrifying.

5 9 Prosaic in subject yet baroque in form and execution, Shi Jinsong’s objects may be seen as recent additions from China to a long list of everyday objects transformed into art that began with Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (1913) and Fountain (1917). These were soon followed by a wide range of everyday objects that have entered the twentieth-century pantheon, from the flat iron that Man Ray used in Gift (1921) to Claes Oldenburg’s soft toilets and Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, of the 1960s. The fascination with everyday objects continues with Mona Hatoum and Robert Gober, both of whom have extended the range of references. In her monumental Mouli-Julienne (x21) (2001), Mona Hatoum entered the world of the kitchen, while Robert Gober’s sinks, cribs, and playpens of the 1980s offer scathing commentary on the politics of the nursery.

From Duchamp to Hatoum, everyday objects have been a major theme in twentieth century art, presented in an unaltered state in gallery spaces, modified to varying degrees in assemblages, and imaginatively transformed by Dadaists and Surrealists. Shi Jinsong is a recent addition to this select group of object-fetishists, but his credentials are somewhat unusual. He was born in Danyang County, Hubei Province in 1969. The capital of Hubei, Wuhan, is better known as a major industrial city than as a cultural centre but it was here that he enrolled at the Hubei Academy of Fine Arts and majored in sculpture in 1994. Unlike so many art schools in the West, the curriculum at the academies in China is still largely traditional, and Shi Jinsong mastered the whole range of sculptural techniques, carving in stone and modelling in clay in preparation for casting in bronze.

Wuhan, one of the famous “Three Furnaces” of China, is rather far from Beijing, but the exciting developments occurring in the capital from 1989 onwards were not without consequence throughout the country. Painting followed one course and was rapidly embraced by the West, performance artists did their own thing (not always with the approval of the authorities), but what was a young sculptor to do? What was the appropriate subject matter for sculpture in the mid 1990s? Communist heroes? Clearly not, and as yet there were no capitalist heroes. The approach adopted by Cai Guoqiang in his recreation at the 2000 Venice Biennale of the Rent Collection Courtyard, a celebrated Socialist Realist tableau of 114 clay sculptures depicting the ways in which a cruel landlord exploited his peasants, could not be developed any further. Family values? No. Abstract bronze forms with no redeeming social values? No.

What was the appropriate material for sculpture in the 1990s? Stone carving and modelling in clay seemed to him to be too associated with tradition to reflect in any meaningful way the changing quality of life in China in the 1990s. Shi Jinsong has admitted that he did not have a ready answer to these questions right after graduating, and that is probably just as well. As the art world has developed today, it too often expects young artists to have ready answers as soon as they have graduated. Ready answers become commodities at the drop of a hat.

It seems that, for a time, rather than making any grand statements, Shi Jinsong turned to making a series of ephemeral works incorporating branches, leaves, seedpods, and other natural materials that reflect his dilemma in the clearest way. Turning his back on traditional themes and media, he created a series of works that were doomed to impermanence, as fleeting as ikebana.

Although he continued with this low-key activity, more important developments were occurring in his thinking than in his practice. Society was being transformed, lifestyles were being upended in the most dramatic fashion, cities were being razed and built from scratch, and domestic

6 0 appliances and luxury goods were beginning to be within the reach of millions of newly enriched individuals, at least those living in the cities. Rather than reflect these changes in a non-thinking way, seeking for literal visual equivalents as so many of the Political Pop artists had, Shi Jinsong stood back for a time, a stance facilitated by his strong interest in Zen Buddhism, Daoism, and taiji. To ruminate on non-attachment and reflect on the non-existence of the self in the ever more acquisitive 1990s was in itself a fairly revolutionary step.

As important in the devel opm ent of his thinking were the wri ti n gs of Mi ch e l Fo u c a u l t , p a r ti c u l a rly Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1961), which were as widely discussed in China as they were in the West. Shi Jinsong has said that although he had a limited knowledge of the text itself, Foucault’s dense history of the idea of madness in the West and of its treatment and the insti tuti ons that devel oped to con trol it, h ad a strong unconscious influ en ce on him. Fo u c a u l t’s reflections on power—the power of the state and institutions over individuals, of professionals over prisoners and those deemed to be mad—facilitated a greater understanding of the political, cultural, and social dimensions of the society in which he lived.

The birth of a daughter late in 1999 changed Shi Jinsong’s life, giving it a focus it had not had before. In addition to taking care of his daughter and writing essays on cultural issues, he now began to produce works that gave three-dimensional form to his concerns. A series of works in sugar resulted from his observation of his daughter’s love of sweets, notably Sweet Life (2001), which was included in Alors La Chine at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2003. In this work everyday objects representing the material aspirations of today’s Chinese were cast in caramel and lined up on a shelf. They melted during the course of the exhibition, their lifespan sometimes only marginally shorter than their equivalents in the real world.

In today’s world, weapons are also objects of desire, but land-mines last longer than the latest cell phone or iPod. In Secret Book of Cool Weapons (2002), the artist turned his attention to corporate logos, powerful weapons in the corporate battles that increasingly define our lives. The logos of Mercedes Benz, Nike, etc., were reconceived as ancient weapons and presented on a rune-covered sheepskin displayed in a vitrine.

Then there was the world of the baby, or rather the world of the baby as conceived by caretakers. Strollers and baby carriages, at one time dainty and elegant cocoons for the child, have morphed into miniature defensive vehicles which have all the grace of a Humvee. Once his daughter was born, Shi Jinsong had to buy a stroller as well as toys, only to realize that these not inexpensive items have become necessities that aim to please the purchaser rather than the occupant. How cruel, he thought, to submit the soft, yielding form of the infant to these devices that too often resemble instruments of torture. Is it not a power-game, designed to bolster the ego of the parent rather than to satisfy the desires of the child? As soon as it enters the world, the innocent child is engulfed in materialism, becoming its victim, however well-intentioned the motives of the provider. Just like the proud owner of a new car who soon becomes its slave, the child is destined from the start to dependence on material things.

First to emerge in Shi Jinsong’s anatomical study of everyday objects that have an extraordinary impact on our lives was Baby Stroller, conceived in 2001 and executed in 2003. Meticulously assembled in stainless steel from mechanical drawings, the stroller is like a high-tech version of a Roman quadriga, bristling with enough weapons to defeat an overwhelming number of enemy

6 1 Shi Jinsong, Na Zha Wa l ke r, 2 0 0 5 , stainless steel. Courtesy of Chambers Fine A r t , New Yo r k . combatants or young mothers taking their babies for a stroll. Attachments open into wings, enabling the carriage to fly while cutting down the enemy at the same time.

Shortly after followed several works based on the work station, including Office Equipment— Prototype No. 1. Like the baby in his carriage, Shi Jinsong sees the contemporary office worker as the victim of powers over which he has no control. As described by Bernard Fibicher: “The artist sees his objects as a metaphor for the authoritarian nature of design as propagated in modern China, and also as a criticism of indifference to violence. Of course, they must also be seen as the ultimate outcome of the functionalism and cold rationalization of planning in the time of totalitarianism.”1

While the office worker is subjugated by his work station, the peasant dreams of a new tractor, one that will free him of the back-breaking drudgery of his present work pattern. Departing from a rusty old tractor he dismantled, Shi Jinsong has envisioned a streamlined implement, a distant cousin of the Harley-Davidson, called Halong-Kellong (2004), which incorporates not only the mechanical elements of a tractor but also radio and karaoke equipment. How long will it be before the proud owner of this super tractor becomes its slave?

In works such as these Shi Jinsong sees himself as an anatomist of contemporary culture who, through the process of deconstructing and re-imagining familiar objects, reveals the forces that dominate our lives in ways we cannot imagine. He has now turned back to Chinese tradition and

62 Shi Jinsong, Na Zha Cra d l e, 2 0 0 5 , stainless steel . Courtesy of Chambers Fine A r t , New Yo r k . fo l k l ore , and a new baby has en tered his life — Na Zha—wh o, u n l i ke his own daugh ter, was perfect ly capable of taking care of himself.

As naughty as baby Krishna but capable of much greater mischief, even today Na Zha is known and beloved by Chinese worldwide. This is no great surprise, perhaps, as today he is known chiefly as a god of lotteries and gambling. The fantastic attributes that eons ago enabled him to cause oceans to boil and demons to drop dead are now so atrophied that only the “cuteness” remains. Peeling away layer upon layer of sugar coating, Shi Jinsong introduced to New York a full range of implements and devices that might have been pleasing to the divine child in his original awe-inspiring form.

Some background may be required. A key figure in Chinese mythology and folklore who also appears in various guises in dramas and in novels such as The Journey to the West, Na Zha was originally an immortal named Da Luo in the court of the Jade Emperor, Ruler of Heaven. Sent down to earth by the Jade Emperor, Da Luo was introduced into the womb of the wife of Emperor Li Jing. Reborn as Na Zha, he entered the world wearing a gold bracelet (the Horizon of Heaven and Earth) and wearing a pair of red silk trousers. It was clear he was a remarkable child! By the time he was six years old he was six feet tall and a force to be reckoned with.

Problems began when he went to bathe in the East Sea. So great was the heat emanating from his red silk trousers that the ocean began to boil, a fact not unnoticed in the palace of the East Sea

63 Shi Jinsong, Na Zha Toy s, 2 0 0 5 , stainless steel. Court esy of Chambers Fine A r t , New Yo r k .

Dragon King. After a series of encounters Na Zha finally killed the Dragon King as he was about to enter the Gate of Heaven to complain to the Jade King about Na Zha’s behavior. Sometime later Na Zha committed suicide in order to save his parents from the wrath of the three remaining Dragon Kings (of the West Sea, the North Sea, and the South Sea).

Reborn from a lotus flower, the sixteen-foot-tall prince was finally reconciled with his father, and they joined forces to slay demons. Recognizing his virtues, the Jade Emperor appointed Na Zha Generalissimo of the Thirty-six Celestial Officers, Grand Marshal of the Skies and the Gate of Heaven. The naughty boy survived to become an immortal whose birthday is celebrated even today on the 8th and 9th of the fourth lunar month of the Chinese calendar.

Shi Jinsong’s Na Zha is fearsome indeed. Gone are the cuteness and the floating scarves of today’s popular manifestation; these are replaced by a three-headed, eight-armed, weapon-bearing figure that resembles a wrathful deity from the Tantric tradition. Wielding knives as his attributes and sucking on a knife-pacifier, the steely child seems to be looking for mischief. Melding folklore and contemporary marketing techniques, Shi Jinsong presents in his Na Zha Baby Boutique consumer products that would be strong enough to withstand the force of the divine child’s tantrums and the urgency of his bodily desires—the flamboyant Stroller, fanciful Walker, Bottles, and indestructible Cradle.

Analyst, fabulist, and fabricator, Shi Jinsong arrived in New York with a body of unsettling work that revealed unexpected parallels between the myths of old and the myth of childhood today.

This text was originally published in Shi Jinsong: Na Zha—Baby Care Guide (New York: Chambers Fine Art, 2006)

Notes 1 Bernard Fibicher, ed., Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005), 114.

64 s pɪɴɴɪɴɢ cʜɪɴese cʜaʀacteʀs, ʜeʙʀew ʟ etteʀs, aɴd pʟaɪɴ eɴɢʟɪsʜ: ʀo ʙ e ʀt majzeʟs’s 85 p ʀo j e c t c ʟ aɪʀe ʜuot d e s c ʀ ɪ p tɪoɴ of 85 p ʀo j e c t Robert Majzels’s 85 project consists of eighty-five poems, each containing exactly eighty-five char- acters. Extant (consecrated) poems from the Jewish and Chinese traditions are reduced to eighty- five letters in English. The letters, all of identical size and font, lower case, and equidistant from each other, are not grouped into words. As a result, letters become material, plastic, and pictorial.

Each eighty-five letter text is flanked by two backward nunim, the Hebrew letter . In the Chinese series, the original Chinese poem is sealed in a box below or beside the eighty-five letters. The Hebrew and the Chinese characters are part of the picture. The Tang dynasty series takes on the appearance of forbidding stelae; the Bada Shanren series resembles freewheeling colophons. wʜʏ 85﹖ tʜe ʜeʀmeɴeutɪcaʟ ɢʀo u ɴ d s Why a series of texts each containing exactly eighty-five characters? This formal restriction comes out of thinking about what a book is, but the minimalist approach, limited to something like the number of letters in a postcard, also follows Majzels’s own increasing predilection for fewer words, fewer pages, and more attention to the visual.

Majzels, a novelist, playwright, poet, and translator recognized with a Governor General’s Award in 2000 for his translations of the Acadian France Daigle’s novels, is best known for his experimental novels. His most recent book, Apikoros Sleuth, is a detective story written in the form of and following the labyrinthine mode of Talmudic enquiry.1 In order to write this book, he studied extensively the old Jewish sacred texts of the Talmud, which are composed of a central Midrashic text surrounded by columns of exegetic material and notes.

In the Chabbat Tractate of the Talmud, there is a surprisingly contemporary take on the question of the book.2 On the Sabbath, although work of any kind is strictly forbidden, a holy book must nevertheless be saved from a burning house. But what if the book is damaged? Is it still a book and worthy of being retrieved from the flames? The Talmudic sages argue that, though a book be damaged, if it still contains a minimum of eighty-five letters, it is still a book and must be saved.

But why eighty-five? First, we should recall that the ancient Jewish texts, much like the Chinese, contain no vowels, no punctuation, and only the occasional space between words. In the ancient Torah scroll, there is a unique passage containing eighty-five uninterrupted characters that is enclosed between two nunim ( ) written backwards.3 According to the rabbinical sages, those two backward letters are meant to identify the enclosed passage as a book in itself.

The reasoning here is by no means purely formalist, as a closer reading of the contents of this passage of eighty-five characters in the Torah demonstrates. The coffer discussed in this passage is the Ark of the Covenant, which contains the Law that Moses brought down from Sinai, the Law that governs all meaning. The passage stipulates that the Ark must remain mobile, always ready to travel. To ensure its portability, the poles of acacia wood that flank the coffer must never

65 be removed. The potential perpetual movement of the Ark of the Covenant is a metaphor for the continual movement of meaning.

This idea is at the base of Majzels’s hermeneutical project: to create a series of works containing eighty-five characters, marked as books or passages by the two backward nunim, presenting the book as a dynamic relation between object, text, and reader/viewer, as a potentially endless production of meaning issuing from both the visual and textual. e x p e ʀ ɪ m e ɴ t : daʀk wo ʀ d s Majzels began by producing an initial series of eighty-five character texts based on translations of Paul Celan (1920–1970), a poet with whom Majzels has a strong affinity. Both men are of Jewish European background, and their parents were imprisoned in concentration camps. They also share a reluctance to invest faith in anything and a marked preoccupation with language. In Majzels’s words, confronted with the impossibility of destroying language, the poet tries at least to “hurt it a little.” Majzels takes loving hold of Celan’s already terse poems, translated from the German, and delicately pushes their desolate, alien feel to another level.4

In the following example, only a few words have been removed from the original translation, but, by refusing to group the letters into words, arranging the letters instead into five long lines of seventeen lower case characters and transforming them into intaglioed white letters in a black rectangular box, the artist creates a paradoxical effect: although words have been abraded, volume, and therefore weight, is increased. The deletion of words and the one comma in the original poem further lessens the referential burden of the Celan poem. Words string together, emerging from the black background, according to where the viewer rests his or her eye: “world, stutter, wound, a guest, a name, sweat,” as nightmarishly endless permutations, or linguistic visions.

World to be stuttered after in which I will have been a guest, a name sweated down from the wall where a wound licks up high5

At the same time, each letter deployed over the surface of the page carries its own weight. The viewer juggles letters while his or her brain struggles to process words. Stuttering to produce words broken by line endings, the viewer discovers emerging relations that generate meaning. From its central position, the word-group “a guest a name sweat” engages with the first line’s five letter “world” and the last line’s “wound,” and so on, as the eye moves back and forth to yield limitless interplay.

This series of 8 5s after Cel a n , with the out s tretch ed bre adth of t h eir pre s en t a ti on , the sharp linguisti c cuts, and the black background (in the actual work, the box is also enclosed between two nunim), succeed in creating burning books with words of pain.

6 6 tʜe secoɴd seʀɪes: tʜe ʀeductɪoɴ pa ʀa d ox It is not necessary to be a poet or trained exegete to decode these poems. All that is required is a willingness to play. The eighty-five-letter puzzles can be cracked like acrostics. Majzels’s second series of 85s are based on the Old Testament’s Song of Songs, which consists largely of love verses. Originally in Aramaic, and translated traditionally, like the Bible, into Elizabethan English, they are now grouped and reduced by Majzels into 85s. As a result, they are suddenly made resolutely contemporary:6

The eye can easily string together the short, simple, concrete words, locating “thigh” in its central position on the grid, with “wheat” immediately below, while other terms such as “purple delight” allow the viewer to bring to the text his or her own experience. Majzels, by eliding specific biblical references (for example to King Solomon or to God), or terms indicating gender, time, and location, and by stripping down archaic expressions and eliminating similes, creates an uncanny effect. The airy distribution of the letters and the shifting signifiers (“sins” turning into “sandals”), untrammeled by a box and endowed with wings in the shape of the nunim, combine to open up the text to intricate play. Paradoxically here, reduction—reduction of words, and elimination of formal divisions (spaces between words, verses, capitals, punctuation)—acts to multiply meaning.

Majzels’s 85 project is first and foremost an experimental procedure enacted on the English language upon which Anglo-American culture is founded, designed to move it away from its dominant position as the world’s most assimilative tongue, to render it fragile and precarious. He imports the texts of other cultures and forces his own to become their ghostly palimpsests. Through rigorous abrasion, meaning explodes. He invests English letters, which do not even have the diacritical marks that could draw attention to individual letters, with materiality. Without a signature, bereft of their original cultural signifiers, the 85s are objects ready to be experienced, displaced, and moved by the viewer and, ultimately, those eighty-five letters move the viewer too. tʜe co ɴ f ʟueɴce of ʀaʙʙɪɴɪcaʟ aɴd t ʀa d ɪ t ɪ o ɴaʟ cʜɪɴese woʀʟd aɴd woʀd v ɪ e ws In his study of the Talmud, Majzels concentrated on rabbinical thinking as deployed in Jewish exegetical reading and writing. His vision of language is particularly founded on the work of two heretic Cabbalists, Rabbi Nahman of Braslav (late eighteenth century) and Rabbi Abraham Abulafia (thirteenth century). Without rehearsing here the many legends and anecdotes that surround these two historical figures and their work,7 a couple of quotations from their writings will suffice to indicate the background for Majzels’s treatment of letters as discrete objects:

The letters are without any doubt the root of all wisdom and knowledge, and they are themselves the contents of prophecy, and they appear in the prophetic vision as though opaque bodies speaking to man face to face saying most of the intellective comprehensions thought in the heart of the one speaking them. And they appear as if pure living angels are moving them about and teaching them to man, who turns them about in the form of wheels in the air, flying with their wings, and they are spirit within spirit.” (Rabbi Abraham Abulafia)8

Even an ordinary man, if he takes time to read, if he looks at the letters of the Torah, he will be able to see new things, new meanings; that is to say, by an intensive gazing at the letters, these will start to

67 create light, to mix, to combine, and he will be able to see new arrangements of letters, new words, and he will be able to see in the book things the author did not think of at all.” (Rabbi Nahman of Braslav)9

Susan Handelman, writing on the crucial legacy of rabbinical reading for modern-day hermeneu- tics, has traced the subversive current of such reading and thinking operating under the surface of the dominant Greco-Christian world view throughout the history of Western civilization.10 This vision of reading as an endless generation of meaning, as an open-ended operation, has been returned to the forefront of Western philosophy and the social sciences by a number of twentieth- century thinkers, notably Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida, who, not coincidentally, had roots in the Jewish tradition.

For the Chinese, the treatment of language as a continual exercise of metonymical displacement is nothing new. Traditionally, the Chinese have viewed their characters as both emanating and extending from nature (bird tracks on the sand, patterns on tortoises, stellar configurations). The characters have always been sacred. The Daoists have turned written words into talismans, and the calligraphers have turned writing into an enduring art where the execution, the writing itself, signifies more than the semantics.11 “In China words are no idle sounds, nor are characters or pictures merely ink or paint. . . . They altogether constitute or produce the reality which they express or represent. . . . Any desired magical effect may be expressed in words or writing.”12

Handelman’s analysis of the rabbinical reading of texts sounds eerily like a statement on the traditional Chinese view of language as “metonymical . . . retaining differences within identity, stressing relationships of contiguity rather than substitution, preferring multivocal as opposed to univocal meanings, the play of as if over the assertion of is, juxtaposition over equivalencies, concrete images over abstractions. Rabbinic interpretation never dispenses with the particular form in which the idea is enclothed. The text, for the Rabbis, is a continuous generator of meaning which arises from the innate logic of the divine language, the letter itself, and is not sought in a non-linguistic realm external to the text. Language and the text are . . . the space of differences, and truth . . . is not an instantaneous unveiling of the One, but a continuous sequential process of interpretation.”13

It was almost inevitable that Majzels would, at some point in his 85 experimentation, turn to Chinese writing. The latter part of his novel Apikoros Sleuth was written in Beijing, where he spent two years learning Mandarin. Imperceptibly, as the novel neared completion, and as his readings started to include more and more material on China, especially on Chinese language, calligraphy, and poetry, the Chinese influence began to affect his work. He realized that Chinese and Hebrew, two of the oldest surviving languages, had many common elements, in particular the view of writing as a system autonomous to speech and constitutive of the world around us. In fact, both civilizations are grounded in the written word, which is invested with transformative powers. tʜe fɪʀst cʜɪɴese seʀɪes, tʜe taɴɢ dʏ ɴa s tʏ: st e ʟ ae of meaɴɪɴɢ Majzels first approached China’s most canonical poems, those of the Tang Dynasty (618–907), after which he also turned his attention to Bada Shanren (seventeenth century), possibly China’s most idiosyncratic artist.

Majzels was able to get a solid sense of Chinese classical poetry thanks to François Cheng’s crucial work L’Écriture poétique chinoise,14 which not only analyzes Tang poetry in general and in great detail, but especially provides the non-fluent reader of Chinese the necessary tools to read the

6 8 works—each poem is first presented in Chinese characters, then in a Romanized transcription, then a literal (character-by-character) translation, and finally a more normalized translation. At the artist’s request, I did a more detailed, character-by-character translation, this time in English. And we followed the same methodology in dealing with the work of Bada Shanren. Majzels selected a number of the artist’s inscriptions from the catalogue of the 1991 Yale University Bada Shanren exhibition,15 and I transcribed the poems in Chinese characters and in Pinyin, and then produced a character-by-character literal translation.

Majzels is not a sinologist, and perhaps because of this, he is in a sense free of the specialist’s compulsion to elucidate allusions, decode symbols, and explicate the strict rules of classical Chinese poetry. On the other hand, he is not content to ogle the dazzling pictographs and cursive tour de force or wallow in the tiny poetic glimpses of nature. Majzels, eschewing these more typical We s tern re acti ons to Chinese classical art , works inste ad to break open the English language . The result, which may, but should not surprise us, is that his 85s are extraordinarily faithful to the originals.

In figure 1, we see Wang Wei’s famous poem “Deer Fence” (20 characters) and Majzels’s eighty-five letters:

F i g u re 1. Robert Majzels, After Wang We i , Deer Fence, 2 0 0 5 , ink on paper, 101.6 x 41.2 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

69 The most visually striking trait is the monumentality of the work, with its eighty-five white letters ensconced in a long vertical black rectangle in five columns of seventeen letters. By contrast, the Chinese poem below it, presented in a sealed, bordered box, appears small, though not diminished because it is hard as rock, like a seal. Twenty characters, the size of a jueju, yield approximately eighty-five letters in English. Here the nunim flanking the long columns add a funereal dimension (Abulafia’s wings of angels) that transform the 85 into a stele, an inscribed gravestone. With the Chinese seal-like box marking the poem as canonic, inviolable, the work as a whole evokes the Chinese millenary practice of engraving written works on stone slabs, which are afterward transferred by rubbings onto paper, and thus preserved. F. W. Mote’s observation—“the past of the Chinese is a past of words, not of stones”16 —applies not only to China but also to the Jews, people of the word.

All the eighty-five-letter renditions of Tang dynasty poems follow this strict format.17 When they are exposed side by side, the rigid frontal effect evokes monumentality. And yet, when a viewer a t tem pts to make sense of the tex t , he or she is drawn into a world of del i c a te em o ti on s , u n ders t a ted impressions, gazing at these letters arranged, following the traditional Chinese fashion, in vertical columns, from right to left. The eye is disoriented.18 The change in reading direction serves to disalign and resource the eye, to draw it into another way of looking. Thus letters collide momentarily with one another, and the effect is always more than just the sum of the letters. Traditional poetic effects like allitera- tion and assonance are materialized, for example the repetition of “s” in the final “moss” and across the last three columns, or the echo of “o” in “echo.”

In addressing Chinese works, Majzels turns away from common Orientalist approaches, neither exoticizing nor normalizing. He avoids the temptation to tease additional meaning out of the pictographic qualities of Chinese script; nor does he pile on more words to render the poem more “Western,” more comprehensible. He refrains from individualizing the experience by not inserting the first-person pronoun, which is absent from the Chinese poems.19

The effacement of self in much Buddhist and Daoist-inspired Chinese classical poetry, the diminishment of ego, and at the very least the ambigu- ous presence of the subject as distinct from nature and the surrounding world, coincides with Majzels’s view of writing as a whittling down of self, F i g u re 2. Robert Majzels, After Li Bai, Contemplating Mount Jingting, 2 0 0 5 , ink on paper, 101.6 x 41.2 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

7 0 language, and power. His poem “After Li Bai, Contemplating Mount Jingting”—the letters a-t-o-n- e/a-n-o-t-h-e-r, the words “at one” and “another” coincidentally echoing—offers a superb visual and tex tual ren d i ti on of the Chinese word , “mutu a l ,” i t s el f com po s ed of t wo parts both pron o u n ced “mu,” providing an added, non-aural and non-representational surplus of meaning.

The flu i d i ty of the Chinese tex t , wh i ch has no punctu a ti on , com bi n ed with its syntactical stru ctu re , allows for the subject and, in the Li Bai poem above, the mountain to momentarily merge. This drift of subjectivity is re-enacted in the 85. Majzels also manages to maintain a tension between intense gazing at the long vertical configurations and the slow but serene processing of meaning, “until only the mountain remains” (see figure 2, columns 4 and 5). The ephemeral moments that are characteristic of Chinese classical poems have been converted into an English which is respectful of difference while maintaining the exquisite tension between the visual and textual. tʜe secoɴd cʜɪɴese seʀɪes, ʙa da sʜaɴʀeɴ: fʀee co ʟo pʜ o ɴ s If the Tang dynasty 85s present a stark symmetry, Majzels’s second Chinese series, After Bada Shanren, produces a totally different effect; here, free form is at play. Indeed, there are no boxes around the eighty-five letters; nor are the columns entirely symmetrical. Instead, we have eight columns of ten letters and a dangling ninth of five; the nunim, until now identically angled and positioned, seem to have gone wild, occasionally flying off into blank space, as if unable to contain the letters. Meanwhile, the “seals” containing the Bada Shanren inscriptions, rather than in intaglio, are in relief, black on white, with a barely visible border, and are located differently in each work. Consequently the visual possibilities are multiplied tenfold by the now-dynamic relation of the Hebrew and Chinese characters.

Bada Shanren pushed to the limit the composition of the traditional Chinese work of art. Whereas traditional paintings had often been enriched by inscriptions and seals, these were never quite as integrated into the work as they appear in Bada Shanren. He maintains a heightened tension between calligraphy and painting wherein neither illustrates the other or is one subordinated to the other. The blank spaces in his works are tremendously fertile, sometimes adding perspective, sometimes removing it; the viewer cannot easily identify or distinguish, as in traditional Chinese art, the unpainted, unwritten spaces as water or sky. Bada Shanren uses a highly singular vocabulary and array of techniques. His inscriptions are supremely personal, yet never manifestly autobiographical. He takes liberties with calligraphic styles, even with Chinese characters. His seals often lack borders and contain characters that are commingled in starkly new ways.

Bada Shanren’s works are often great puzzles, a proliferation of signifiers that cannot be fully deciphered, even when one takes into account all of their elements: the blank spaces, the brushed and written surfaces, the seals, and of course the poems.

Majzels’s fascination with Bada Shanren is evidenced by the large number of 85s he has composed based on his work. Bada Shanren, the seventeenth-century idiosyncratic artist and hermit, has found a kindred spirit in this twenty-first-century Jewish recluse, son of Holocaust survivors, who shares his sense of self-derision and a love-hate relationship with the world of art, not to mention the world itself.

Bada Shanren’s repertory of figures is equally surprising, filled with anything but the exotic: common animals and vegetables, which, however, always look a little strange. Cats, birds, fish, or bunnies eye the viewer with a mischievous gleam; melons are manifestly overripe, lotus stems

71 emerge twisted from soft rocks. The apposed texts do not serve to enlighten the reader; mostly they baffle us. We are confronted by a double rebus. Consider, for example, a leaf album entitled Globefish wherein the right half is a fish; the left, a poem. The globefish—better known as puffer-fish or blowfish—staring at the viewer is clearly on the verge of puffing up, as it invariably does when threatened. There is something amusing about the fish, almost cartoon-like, but for one who knows that this species is carnivorous and poisonous, the effect is unsettling.

F i g u re 3. Robert Majzels, After Bada Shanre n , Water Pig in Ye l l ow B amboo V i l l a g e, 2 0 0 5 , ink on paper, 38.1 x 55.8 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Majzels maintains the spirit of the rebus: “Rain over Yellow Bamboo a boat spoons mist how to get a meal of sprouts one must eat water pig upside down.” It’s a light statement on the plight of the hu n gry artist who prefers not to com prom i s e . 2 1 At the end of this 8 5, the vi ewer may sigh , rel i eved : d-o-w-n points downward, easy to read; but if one backtracks, isn’t it u-p-s-i-d-e-d-o-w-n? Majzels takes liberties with Bada Shanren’s inscriptions. He sometimes also engages with the painting. For example, in the work depicting two misshapen melons in the foreground and with a top-right inscription,22 the poem does not mention melons, although it is talking about two of something (figure 4). Majzels inserts the melons into his 85. In this way, the viewer of the work virtually begets melons as they have been displaced in the 85. In the spirit of Bada Shanren, the mystery around the melons remains.

The particular play of the five letters—the most common number of letters in an English word— in the shorter last column becomes more apparent when one views all the works of this series together. Sometimes the final word standing alone brings up to the surface an undercurrent in the poem or highlights the tension in a dialectic, the word “fight,” for example, at the end of the phrase, “not to pick a fight.” A number of odd new words seem to be created: “edown,”“dsnow,” “eplow,”“emind,” and the exponentially entertaining “ntain.” Exhibited as a group, these dozen not-quite-square sheets the size of a Chinese album leaf, act as counterpoints to, or stand-ins for, Bada Shanren’s album leaves that inspired them.

The level of engagement with the work depends on the individual viewer’s degree of playfulness. Bada Shanren, himself, is often cryptic and baffling, and yet his work employs what appears to be

72 childlike iconography. In the same spirit, Majzels’s 85 project uses plain, everyday English vocabulary, but the viewer stutters on the most deceptively simple words, the verb “is,” the preposition “at,” the adverbial negation “not,” the personal pronoun “me.” co ɴ c ʟusɪoɴ: ɴo specɪaʟ effects There are no special effects, no pyrotechnics, in the 85 project.23 On paper or on positive film, the letters—all identical in size and equidistant—are printed in a Figural Book font, known for its legibility, the sort of font one might use in books and magazines. Only black ink is used, the Hebrew letters printed in a lighter tone. In one incarnation, the letters are stencilled or stamped directly on a wall, or paper transfers are used, all in a commonly available font, and without the slightest demonstration of calligraphic or painterly mastery. Just as the texts themselves are emptied of authorial voice, the writing/painting of the 85s does not strive for effect through traditional methods of signification and metaphor: there is no effort at representation, no mimetic use of shapes or arrangement of words to mimic their meaning (an oft-used technique in concrete poetry).

The objective here is to allow the viewer to experience, using the best of his or her own abilities, the possibilities of each work. We are invited to “read” the work, much as we would “read” a work of Chinese calligraphy: we follow the motions—the loops and sweeps, the gentle initiation and abrupt stops of a stroke, a line—gathering information along the way, punctuating, vocalizing in and with our own brea(d)th. In this way, written language—Hebrew letters, Chinese characters, or plain English—is released to endlessly generate meaning, and we are engaged in the act of writing.

F i g u r e 4. Robert Majzels, After Bada Shanre n , Misshapen Melons, 2 0 0 5 , ink on paper, 38.1 x 55.8 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

73 Notes 1 For a glimpse at the book, see http://www.bigbridge.org/rrapikoros.htm. The cover artwork is by Shanghai artist Xiang Liqing. 2 Marc-Alain Ouaknin, a French philosopher, discusses rabbinical thinking about the book in his philosophical treatise Le livre brûlé (Paris: Lieu Commun, 1986). 3 Chapter 10:35 and 36 of the Book of Numbers, "Whenever the coffer was to travel . . . ” in the Five Books of Moses. The Schocken Bible: Volume 1, ed. and trans. by Everett Fox (New York: Schocken Books, 1983–95). 4 Ten of Majzels’s Celan poems have been published as "Books from the Burning Building," in NO: A Journal of the Arts 5 (April 2006), 48–58. 5 The English translation is by John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 255. 6 “Your beautiful steps in sandals/Your chain link thighs/Your heap of wheat set in lilies/Purple delight” is gleaned from verses 2–7 of chapter 7: 2 How beautiful are thy steps in sandals, O prince's daughter! The roundings of thy thighs are like the links of a chain, the work of the hands of a skilled workman. 3 Thy navel is like a round goblet, wherein no mingled wine is wanting; thy belly is like a heap of wheat set about with lilies. 4 Thy two breasts are like two fawns that are twins of a gazelle. 5 Thy neck is as a tower of ivory; thine eyes as the pools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bath-rabbim; thy nose is like the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus. 6 Thy head upon thee is like Carmel, and the hair of thy head like purple; the king is held captive in the tresses thereof. 7 How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights! Translation by Benyamin Pilant, 1997; see http://www.breslov.com/bible/Song_of_Songs.htm. 7 Abulafia is best known for his triumph over Pope Nicholas III. Having been condemned to death by the Pope, the Rabbi spent the night engrossed in the Cabbalist ritual involving the permutation of the letters of the alphabet. The next morning, it was discovered the Pope had died in the night. Rabbi Nahman, for his part, burned the sole copy of his own master work, arguing against the reification of meaning and books and for the need to always make way for new texts. Majzels has created a performance based on Abulafia’s technique; the text (unpublished) is entitled “alphABetiCal tError.” For Rabbi Nahman’s conception of the book, see Ouaknin, Le Livre brûlé. 8 In Moshe Idel, The Mystical Experience in Abraham A b u l a fia,t r a n s . J o n ath an Chipman (New Yo r k : S t ate University of New York Press, 1 9 8 8 ) , 1 0 1 . 9 Ouaknin, Le Livre brûlé, 394. 10 Susan A. Handelman, The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982). 11 For a well-rounded account of the magic origins and lasting aura of Chinese writing, see Jonathan Chaves, “The Legacy of Ts’ang Chieh: The Written Word as Magic,” in Oriental Art 23, no. 2 (summer 1977), 200–15. 12 J. J. M. De Groot, cited in Chaves, 209. 13 Handelman, The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory, 88. 14 François Cheng, L’Écriture poétique chinoise (Paris: Seuil, 1977). 15 Wang Fangyu, Richard M. Barnhart, Judith G. Smith, eds., Master of the Lotus Garden: The Life and Art of Bada Shanren (1626–1705) (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1991). 16 F. W. Mote, “A Millenium of Chinese Urban History: Form, Time, and Space Concepts in Soochow,” Rice University Studies 59, no. 4 (1973). Quoted in French by Simon Leys in L’Humeur, l’honneur, l’horreur (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1991), 46. 17 Some of these 85s were initially stencilled as single works directly on walls for a totally different effect. See figure 2, a stencil with Chinese scarlet pigment of “After Li He, Li Ping Plays the Konghou.” 18 To reorient you, here are the 85 divided into words : desolation mountain/faint echo of human voices/dusk shadows in a deep forest/a last green glint of moss. 19 Compare Majzels’s version with the following translation by C. J. Chen and Michael Bullock, in Anthology of Chinese Literature: From Early Times to the Fourteenth Century, Cyril Birch, ed. (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 220–21: “On the lonely mountain/I meet no one,/I hear only the echo/of human voices /At an angle the sun’s rays/enter the depths of the wood, /And shine/upon the green moss.” 20 Leaf C, Globefish, from Fish, Lotus, Globefish, and Bamboo (1689). The Chinese poem is transcribed on 103, and explicated on 104, in Master of the Lotus Garden. 21 See photographs of different incarnations of the work. In figures 5 and 6, the 85 was stamped on a kitchen wall; in figure 7, works from this series were produced in ink on positive film for Vispo! Blends and Bridges, a visual poetry group exhibition in Cleveland, Ohio, in April 2006. In this medium the black letters seem to float in space. 22 Melons with inscriptions, Leaf A, Flower Studies (1659–60), Master of the Lotus Garden, 43. The poem is transcribed and explained on 83. 23 Having said this, I should note that Moveable Inc., a Toronto-based typographer, has provided invaluable technical support since the inception of the 85 project.

74 ɴo sɴow oɴ tʜe ʙʀokeɴ ʙʀɪdɢe: fɪʟm aɴd vɪdeo ɪɴsta ʟ ʟ atɪoɴs ʙʏ ʏaɴɢ fudo ɴ ɢ pa ʀasoʟ uɴɪt fouɴdatɪoɴ foʀ co ɴ t e m p o ʀa ʀʏ aʀt, ʟo ɴ do ɴ adeʟe ta ɴ

If it is true, as Slavoj Zizek asserts, that cinema does not give you what you desire but teaches you how to desire, then Yang Fudong’s works are a lesson in desiring and filmic seduction. The monu- m en t a l i ty of his large panel screens envel op yo u , the ri ch lu m i n o s i ty of his co l o u rs or mon och rom e s entice, and not infrequently his characters are shown to be in a state of ineffable wanting.

No Snow on the Broken Bridge (Duan Qiao Wu Xue) is a new major work specially commissioned by Parasol unit and generously exhibited as an eight-screen film installation in a cavernous room on the first floor with each contiguous screen forming a gently curving arc, as if to embrace the viewer in a cinematic field. Taking its title from a famous bridge in the scenic West Lake of Ha n g z h o u , whose name first appe a red in a Tang dy n a s ty poem , the bri d ge is com m on ly recogn i zed as a testament to a well-known folkloric narrative of difficult or even impossible love. According to the legend of the White Snake, the “broken bridge” was the locus of the initial meeting and final reunion between the White Snake spirit and her mortal lover, the scholar Xu Xian—hence its reputation as a symbolic spot for lovers.

Shot as a silent, black-and-white 35mm film and non-synchronously projected onto eight panels, the work appears to continue in the same vein as the artist’s famed Seven Intellectuals in the Bamboo Forest series, although this time there are four couples. The mood is gently languorous, at times edging into the tritely sentimental. The characters are dressed in period costumes of early twentieth-century China—chic ladies in Shanghainese qipao and men in similar sartorial style. It is difficult not to read Yang’s works through the bandied trope of the ‘”intellectual,” but his characters here are more bourgeois than intellectual—they are, instead, the leisure class in some kind of surreal float with the odd goat and parrot appearing and functioning as mystifying elements within the frame. Without any textual narrative to anchor it, this work seems more unwieldy and less satisfying than Seven Intellectuals.

If there is anything “intellectual” about No Snow on the Broken Bridge, it is that it reflects a kind of intellectual torpor, torpor not only within the ideological vacuum in China but also in the discourse we have become inured to in describing Yang’s works. It is here that we encounter v apid and anodyne descriptions such as “beautiful” and “intriguing.” It does not appear that Yang is dealing with anything remotely “intellectual”; rather, he is providing a show of desire. His amorous couples are not the ardent, desirous creatures that we are used to seeing in Western cinema. Given his stated interest in archetypes, I am instead persuaded that Yang shows desiring as a surface affect depleted of individual interior depth, something evident in both the traditional lu re of a t m o s ph eric West Lake scen ery and stock rom a n tic po s e s . L i ke the man in his ph o togra ph i c triptych The First Intellectual, who does not know his object of retaliation, the couples do not seem to have a concrete object of desire, not even their paired partners, emphasized by the i n terch a n ge a bi l i ty of roles su ch as wom en playing a game of c ro s s - d ressing and the men altern a ti n g between Chinese dress and the Western suit.

75 Yang Fudong, installation view of No Snow on the Broken Bridge (Duan Qiao Wu Xue), 2 0 0 6 , 35mm film on eight scre e n s , music by Jin Wa n g. Courtesy of Parasol unit for contempora ry art , L o n d o n , Marian Goodman Gallery, New York /Paris, and ShanghART Gallery, S h a n g h a i .

Yang Fudong, installation view of No Snow on the Broken Bridge (Duan Qiao Wu Xue), 2 0 0 6 , 35mm film on eight scre e n s , music by Jin Wa n g. Courtesy of Parasol unit for contempora ry art , L o n d o n , Marian Goodman Gallery, New York /Paris, and ShanghART Gallery, S h a n g h a i .

A second glance at the title and I notice an aberration, the ostensible theme of love fractured somewhat by a titular subversion: Yang has chosen to negate the original name of the bridge, L i n gering Sn ow on the Bro ken Bri d ge (Duan Qiao Can Xu e) . (The bri d ge is call ed “bro ken” bec a u s e winter snow melts first on the highest part of the bridge, creating the illusion of a gap) If love and beauty are on exhibit in this work, there is also horror at work in its core: that of a disturbing lull, a trapping of time (and even place), forever portentous of something that is never coming.

But Yang is not unremitting in his ponderous conceit; desire takes a different turn in other recent works on show on the ground floor gallery at Parasol unit. Flutter Flutter . . . Jasmine, Jasmine

76 Yang Fudong, installation view of No Snow on the Broken Bridge (Duan Qiao Wu Xue), 2 0 0 6 , 35mm film on eight scre e n s , music by Jin Wa n g. Courtesy of Parasol unit for contempora r y art, L o n d o n , Marian Goodman Gallery, New York /Paris, and ShanghART Gallery, S h a n g h a i .

Yang Fudong, installation view of No Snow on the Broken Bridge (Duan Qiao Wu Xue), 2 0 0 6 , 35mm film on eight scre e n s , music by Jin Wa n g. Courtesy of Parasol unit for contempora r y art, L o n d o n , Marian Goodman Gallery, New York /Paris, and ShanghART Gallery, S h a n g h a i .

(2002) is a more light-hearted dissection of contemporary heterosexual relationships in China, dispensed through what looks like a three-panel MTV display. A couple confesses the details of their relationship and sing about the anguish and tribulations of courtship through a pop-song love ditty, The Girl in the Sky. The lyrics speak of conventional romantic ideals, and the man and woman are shown staring out dreamily from the rooftop of a city highrise. As much as they seem displaced from reality in their imaginary postulations, they cast into sharp relief just how much we a re shaped by the codes and conven ti ons rep l i c a ted ad infin i tum by MTV and other med i a . The man and woman sing not only of their desires but also those of the general, undifferentiated masses.

77 Yang Fudong, installation view of No Snow on the Broken Bridge (Duan Qiao Wu Xue), 2 0 0 6 , 35mm film on eight scre e n s , music by Jin Wa n g. Courtesy of Parasol unit for contempora ry art , L o n d o n , Marian Goodman Gallery, New York /Paris, and ShanghART Gallery, S h a n g h a i .

Yang Fudong, installation view of J i a e r’s Livestock (jiaer de sheng ko u ), 2 0 0 2 – 2 0 0 5 , t w o - channel video install ation, music by Miya Dudu. Courtesy of Parasol unit foundation for contempora ry art, L o n d o n , Marian Goodman Gallery, New Yo r k / P a r i s , and ShanghART Gallery, S h a n g h a i .

The other three works on exhibit shift our gaze away from this romantic nexus. Lock Again (2004), a lushly coloured three-minute film of two bruised and battered sailors who are handcuffed together and then find themselves traipsing in and out of parallel fantasies with a mysterious woman, feels more like a witty but empty exercise in visual transformations where the boat in which they are rowing on the river gets transposed onto a large disused swimming pool. The Revival of the Snake (2005) assaults you with a 10-channel digital video installation on ten large screens in a room that is divided in two by a central wall with a screen projection on each side. In contrast to his predilection for cityscapes, Yang takes us to a desolate and remote part of an outback (presumably Chinese) where his protagonist is a young man pitching his survival skills

78 against an unforgiving nature, digging through the frozen ground, making fires, and keeping watch from the top of a tree. If desire permeates the works discussed above, then death or impending peril circumscribes this one (although they are both sides of the same Freudian coin). On one screen, the young man is seen bound and blindfolded, slung Yang Fudong, installation view of J i a e r’s Livestock (jiaer de sheng ko u ), 2 0 0 2 – 2 0 0 5 , t wo - ch a n n e l over a white stray horse, and on video installati on, music by Miya Dudu. Courtesy of Parasol unit foundation for contempora ry art, L o n d o n , Marian Goodman Gallery, New Yo r k / P a r i s , and ShanghART Gallery, S h a n g h a i . another screen is what looks to be a slow-moving funeral procession. Here, the extravagance of his display is instructive and works with the vastness of the depicted landscape—it cannot be taken in all at once, and it compels one to walk across the room to take in the view.

This same logic is also at work in Jiaer’s Livestock (2002–05, unfinished), which is the best work in the exhibition. This two-channel installation is set in two adjacent rooms, and each projection is a version of what appears to be the same narrative construct, challenging the viewer’s deductive powers and demanding time and attention, thereby not merely dissolving into a facile kind of ambiguity. This work pays dividends with sustained viewing, and while it defeats any effort at immediate comparison between the two narratives, its cunning lies in having a small doorway in the bisecting wall in which viewers can stand. This doorway splices the field of vision in half but at the same time allows split-second shifts between two perspectives. Situated in front of the screen in each room is a glass display tank filled with earth; each holds a half-opened white suitcase (its contents mirroring that shown in the film) containing four black-and-white handheld video screens on which the projected scenes are replicated in a jumbled sequence.

Jiaer’s Livestock is also a condensation of Yang’s oft-used devices: his repertoire of actors, inter- changeable character roles, the masquerade of dressing up, and döppelgangers, but this time deployed with a Buster Keaton-like humour. Revolving around a pseudo-whodunit murder plot set in a countryside forest, four characters—a modern “intellectual,” a farmer, a tea-picker, and a village fool—act out two versions of a murder. In the first version, the farmer drowns the intellectual in the river for stealing his cooked corn and then uses the village fool as an accomplice in burying the body whilst the tea-picker spies on their actions. They are enchanted by the contents of the “intellectual’s” suitcase and then, mysteriously, the farmer and the fool are killed off and the tea-picker assumes the dress of the intellectual. Using the same river scene as a pivot and the tea-picker as the spying eye, the second version has the intellectual rescued from the brink of death by the farmer and the fool and fed cooked potatoes. But the two are soon killed off by the intellectual who supposedly has distracted them with the contents of his suitcase. Of course, no one actually dies for they are merely ”acting” or horsing around as stock characters. The parting shot shows the farmer and fool coming back to life, trundling behind the intellectual, but in fact the giveaway clue is already in the video’s opening sequence, where the face of the presumed captive is constantly changing between the four characters. In Yang’s world of “things are not what they seem,” the same shot of a boiling pot can yield different results.

7 9 Yang Fudong, installation view of J i a e r’s Livestock (jiaer de sheng ko u ), 2 0 0 2 – 2 0 0 5 , t w o - channel video install ation, music by Miya Dudu. Courtesy of Para s o l unit foundation for contempora ry art, L o n d o n , Marian Goodman Gallery, New Yo r k / P a r i s , and ShanghART Gallery, S h a n g h a i .

But the most salient difference from Yang’s other works is that the work is sited within the labouring countryside, bringing all the work’s structural devices to bear upon the content of the current situation: the civil unrest and discontent amongst the peasants within villages that threatened to unseat the dynamic growth of the urban centres. What would desire look like displaced onto another locale, onto another class of people? While at first the suitcase in the glass display seemed to function with the quaint effect of Chinese boxes (the film featuring the suitcase is held within a physical suitcase from the film which is then held within a room showing the film featuring the suitcase), the suitcase now seems more like a Pandora’s box of contained desires waiting to erupt.

It would be difficult not to read Yang’s works as bound up with the sociopolitical context of contemporary China, but I am resisting the impulse to read his works primarily within the remit of urban and cultural upheaval in China as if it is this context, prima facie, that fatally predeter- mines it. If we are to remain true to the purported open-endedness of Yang Fudong’s work, our interpretive strategies should address its formal aesthetic and conceptual rigour (or failures at it), and we should analyse what his work does to viewers, how it does what it does, and not just at what it says about China. As Jean-Luc Godard says through his male protagonist, Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Léaud), in his film La Chinoise, “Art doesn’t reproduce the visible. It makes the visible,” he self-reflexively situates the effects and affects of vision in the political.1

Notes 1 Jean-Luc Godard, La Chinoise, France, 99 mins., 1967. See also Paul Klee (1879–1940), “Creative Credo” (1918–20), in The Inward Vision, trans. Norbert Guterman (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1959), 5.

8 0 t ʜ ʀouɢʜ po p u ʟ aʀ expʀessɪoɴ, ɪ ɴ t e ʀ ɴat ɪ o ɴaʟ pʀoject space, ʙɪʀmɪɴɢʜam, uɴɪted kɪɴɢdo m s a ʟ ʟʏ ʟa ɪ

Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou has played a key role in promoting contemporary Chinese art in and from Guangdong province since its opening three and a half years ago. Run by savvy media workers turned curators, Hu Fang and Zhang Wei, it was launched to coincide with the first Guangzhou Triennial in 2002. Since its opening, it has filled a gap in international understandings of contemporary Chinese art, which had been largely focused on Beijing and Zhang Yu a n , C razy English, 1 9 9 9 , DVD still. Courtesy of Int ern a t i o n a l Shanghai. Having carved a niche for themselves, Project Space, B o u rneville Centre f or Visual A r t s , B i r m i n g h a m . the curators moved quickly into the international art circuit. Between them, they have had residencies at international spaces in London and New York and enrolled in a postgraduate curating programme in London. Their latest international offering is a small-scale exhibition, Through Popular Expression, presented from March 22 to April 13, 2006, at International Project Space at the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, United Kingdom.

The exhibition at International Project Space is an adapted version of Through Popular Expression initially shown at Museum Het Domein, Sittard, Netherlands, earlier this year. It continues Vitamin’s profiling of artists from Guangdong province and, more recently, the Pearl River Delta as a whole. Presented in the exhibition are Guangdong-based Cao Fei, Zheng Guogu, and Xu Tan, and Hong Kong-based architects MAP office, alongside Shanghai-based Xu Zhen and Beijing-based Zhang Yuan. While many of the same artists are represented in both exhibitions, there is some variation in the works exhibited. The only pieces to be presented in both shows are arguably the two most ambitious works, Xu Tan’s Music Hall of Zheng Daoxing (2002–2004) and Zhang Yuan’s Crazy English (1999).

The exhibition’s aim is to look at current modes of expression that have developed in response to the fast-paced changes taking place in China. The curators’ interest is in how new modes of popular expression are being used by artists in their work and the potential blurring of boundaries between artist and non-artist. In the International Project Space version of the show, the Beuysian concept of everyone being an artist is stressed to a lesser extent than in the show’s previous incarnation, in which the curatorial statement poses the questions, ”Compared to [the] popular expression, do artists have anything special to express? Suppose[d] that everyone finds his/her own way to express, do[es] people still need art? Who is [an] artist?”

Addressing the interface between artistic and popular creative expression is Xu Tan’s Music Hall of Zheng Daoxing. In it the artist collaborates with his subject, Zheng Daoxing, a retiree who creates his own guitar-like musical instruments and performs in his own band. Instead of taking a purely documentary-style distance from his subject, Xu Tan composes a song based on interviews with Zheng Daoxing, which he then documents him performing. The piece, while not necessarily very

8 1 Cao Fei, Hip Hop, 2 0 0 3 , video still. Courtesy of Inter national Project Space, B o u rneville Centre for Visual A r t s , B i r m i n g h a m . captivating as a stand-alone video work, is interesting as a process and is unusual within a context in which there is limited socially collaborative work.

Cao Fei’s Hip Hop (2003) also uses members of the public but, disappointingly, it lacks the poignancy of some of her other works that have made her currently one of the most touted artists in China. Without the satire of Rabid Dogs (2002) in which office workers are dressed up as dogs

82 Zheng Guogu, Me and My Te a ch e r, 1 9 9 7 , p h o t o g ra p hy an d video. Courtesy of Inter national Project Space, B o u rneville Centre for Visual A r t s , B i r m i n g h a m . and steadfastly ‘work like dogs’ or the quirky surrealism of Cosplayers (2004), the piece, featuring members of the public ranging from an elderly lady to a construction worker attempting Hip Hop moves and gestures, is just that. If, within the context of the exhibition, it is meant to serve as an example of the blurred boundaries between the artist and non-artist, it is limited by its staging and performance for the camera, which makes it seem too deliberate to be read as distinctly individual expressions, and, instead, reads as performances instigated by the artist. The selection of a video, Father (2005), in the Sittard show, that depicts her father a sculptor who was commissioned by the provincial Chinese government to create a monument to Deng Xiao Ping in 2004 was a more t h o u gh t - provoking ch oi ce that not on ly high l i ghts the probl em a tic rel a ti onship bet ween sancti on ed cultural production and individual expression but also serves as a microcosm for the jarring social and economic realities that coexist in China.

The exhibition asks what impact the transition from the political ideology of “the people” to the consumerist notion of “the masses” that is taking place in China has on expression. The piece that demonstrates this transition most strikingly is renowned filmmaker Zhang Yuan’s Crazy English. By far the most interesting piece in the exhibition, the documentary depicts Li Yang, a famous and extremely theatrical and charismatic motivational speaker who teaches English to mass audiences, on tour across the country. The images of massive conference centres filled with audiences of eager learners repeating English phrases after their instructor act as reminders of mass political gatherings but, ironically, instead of being encouraged to be loyal to a political leader or system, they are taught to express their full-fledged consumerist desires. “I have been wanting to buy a car!” the crowd enthusiastically repeats.

Another piece that looks at relationship between social and economic standing is a piece by Zheng Guogu, whose diverse practice includes experiments with calligraphy, design, video, photography, and installation. The piece in Through Popular Expression is a photograph and accompanying video entitled Me and My Teacher (1997). It observes a mentally unstable homeless man whom Zheng Guogu adopts as “his teacher,” photographing himself squatting beside and mimicking him. While appearing real, the piece is also possibly a fictitious construction, like some of his other works, including Ideal Bride (1995). Whether or not it is real, through his use of a vagrant the

83 artist is suggesting that there is an alternative that we can, as the title of the work suggests, learn from, perhaps not necessarily as “an example of purity and freedom,” as the curators state, but an alternative nonetheless.

PRD Story (2003), by MAP office, which designed the main site of 2nd Guangzhou Triennale exhibition, is a visual documentation of development along the Pearl River Delta combining images of the practical with innovative uses of non-spaces, such as the negative space under bridges and disused land without a designated function, with architectural expression. The images include a street restaurant under a flyover, cattle grazing in wasteland, quirky building designs, and images of people who live and work around the superhighway that interconnects the Pearl River Delta cities. The region as a playground for expression is depicted as something that isn’t limited to economic wealth but that exists throughout society as a whole.

The most disappointing work in the exhibition is Xu Zhen’s Road Show (2002), which was left out of the Sittard show. The prankish, slapstick video consisted of the artist, microphone in hand, donning a pair of dark sunglasses and breathing heavily into a microphone. While the piece has the characteristic cheekiness, sexual references, and sensory notions of the body found in his other works, Road Show offers little to the curatorial concept beyond its fleeting humour.

Whilst the topic of the exhibition was timely given its focus at the recent Guangzhou Triennale and its relevance to Vitamin’s work in general, the complexity of the current transitional socioeconomic climate in China, particularly in the Pearl River Delta, could perhaps have been better communicated to the audience through interpretative material. Although the exhibition did not necessarily show the strongest works by the artists, or works that discussed the curatorial concept most effectively, it is nonetheless good to see an impressive list of Chinese artists being shown outside of the larger institutions in the United Kingdom.

84 ɴo ʟocaʟ ɪs aɴ ɪsʟa ɴ d j a s paʀ k. w. ʟau

Dieser Ausdruck "Mainland China," der, wenn man in Hongkong mit Leuten redet, als einzige Bezeichnung für China fungiert, betont, daß Hongkong kein Mainland ist, sondern eine Insel. Eine Insel, wie letztendlich ein Mensch eine Insel ist.

–Boris Groys, “Posthistorische Liebschaften”1

1. s pe c ɪ a ʟ ﹖ Shortly after I had posted some short notes in my blog (written mostly in Chinese) referring to a number of the recent exhibitions curated by Tobias Berger, the newly appointed curator at Para/Site Artspace, I came across the special feature on Hong Kong in the December 2005 issue of Yishu. In Berger’s article “Hong Kong SAR: Special Art Region,” the first text in the feature, he mentioned his surprise about how little artistic contact exists between the arts communities of Hong Kong and its close neighbours like Shenzhen and Guangzhou.2 Yet to me, the true surprise is how Berger fails to understand (or at least to explain) why it occurs as such. His praise of Guangzhou artist Cao Fei, an artist I also pointed out when discussing Berger’s show Irreality, exemplified what seems a very obvious difference in taste between the two art communities. Her work in the show, Rabid Dogs (2002) first caught my attention in Z.O.U., curated by Hou Hanru for the 50th Venice Biennale, with its use of Hong Kong’s legendary Cantonese pop singer Sam Hui’s song Bun gan baat loeng (literally translated “Half Catty Eight Taels,” or “Six of one and half a dozen of the other” in English; which is sort of a Cantonese version of the Beatles’s “Hard Day’s Night”). Yet despite such a familiar element, the “awkwardness”3 of the video, and its mean, exaggerated, mocking style is miles away from the Hong Kong local art community’s taste. I therefore commented that it was no wonder it needed a foreigner like Berger to finally bring it back to be exhibited in Hong Kong. In my blog I was referring to Rabid Dogs appearance at Para/Site in a very positive way, suggesting how Berger fully utilized the advantage of not having the burden of the Hong-Konger’s mentality about the division between oneself and mainland China and hence attaining a smooth transit to Hong Kong’s new identity as China’s SAR (Special Administration Region). By bringing new input into the local art scene and overriding taste differences as if there are none, this should, in the long run, help the local audience to become more receptive to a more diverse spectrum of, or even alien, tastes. ta st e ﹖ In order to let the local English speaking community think about this as well, I quickly wrote a short paragraph in English on this coincidence (as well as this puzzlement) surrounding Berger and his view on Cao Fei. And that was what I originally proposed to expand upon for this article in Yishu. But I hesitated to rewrite those ideas for a serious overseas journal, since taste is a pretty subjective word that does not seem so appropriate. Besides, the term has become almost obsolete in contemporary art discourse, or tends to exist nowadays in plural form, so it does not account for much. So to explicate what appears obvious at first, the translation would suddenly require considerable rewriting. Instead of venturing into a dangerous generalization about the aesthetic preferences of the two places, I redirected my focus to the contextual identity politics, particularly the post-1997 identity struggle (or crisis) of the Hong Kong SAR. This, I believe, could help reveal a new artistic paradigm based on that very “local” concern. I thus felt it might be useful to briefly address each of the different articles in the December 2005 Yishu feature as well.

85 po s t- 7 1 Among the six articles in the Hong Kong feature, John Millichap’s interview with Oscar Ho still seemed very much concerned with the fifteen minutes of worldwide attention due to the sovereignty handover. Chen Shieh-wen’s revisit to Pan Xing Lei’s public action in 1996 also led us to look back at the pre-1997 years. But the Post-’7.1 (which refers to July 1, 2003, when more than 500,000 people joined in the largest post-1997 demonstration) internal paradigmatic shift proposed by local critic Longtin (ending the indefinite post-’97 time frame), I must say, is my foremost present concern.4 1997 is already a distant memory, and all “crisis cinema” writing on Hong Kong at least has to update itself with Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046 (2004), as Boris Groys did (though, in my view, the film that provides the best glimpse at the Hong-Konger’s post-1997 ethos is Yuen Kin To’s McDull, Prince de la Bun (2004)). Berger’s article, despite short summaries of major post-1997 events, is definitely one looking toward the future, ending as it does with the bright note “it is all just starting.” pʀd Tobias’s affirmative attitude toward Hong Kong’s artistic future, one that is increasingly embedded within the wider Pearl River Delta Region (PRD), reminds me of Hu Fang’s idea of “PRD as a global brand,” as he proposed in a special PRD feature of Yishu. Besides being a place that benefits from a genuine regional art exchange, the PRD undeniably helps Hong Kong artists to get international visibility. But, as I have written elsewhere, the imagined internationalization taking place in the post-1997 context picks up an aspect of Hong Kong art that counters marginalization, not just by the Western art world, but also from within Chinese contemporary art.5 The PRD, in this sense, is a somewhat marginalized marginality detour. The marginality of the PRD in China has brought, for example, Canton Express to the Venice Biennale (Hou Hanru’s Z.O.U.) even before the official China Pavilion’s physical landing in 2005. But Hong Kong’s involvement in Z.O.U. seems definitely marginal, with only the street calligrapher “King of Kowloon” and mainland immigrant Yan Lei included.

ʟoc a ʟ Toward all this, Norman Ford’s article “Do ‘(Hong Kong) Chinese’ Artists Dream of Electric Sheep?”6 with its specific section on Map Office’s projects dealing with the PRD, carried an attitude that was a bit more ambivalent (if not skeptical) about “how HK-based artists fit into the overall scheme of Chinese art and its global dissemination.” He even suggested, toward the end, “that modes of representation based purely on national/ethnic grounds are increasingly invalid.” So if Berger might be seen as taking (or playing along with) a regional position to aim for the global, Ford’s strategy in striving for the international is much more ambitious. Proposing a reconfiguration of the power structures,7 Ford placed categories such as Asia and Chinese against the term “local artist.”8 But a bit to my disappointment, the artists he picked, like Amy Cheung and Judy Cheung, are really already among the few Hong Kong artists who are global players. With their overseas university education and extensive travelling, their artworks (particularly those with the airplane and container motifs that Norman picked) also reflect a kind of in-betweenness—in my opinion, a not-so “not-so-non-place.” Their works communicate some sort of global experience in an internationally familiar language. Ford’s mention of the clichéd truism in particular reminded me of Joan Kee’s “Art, Hong Kong, and Hybridity: A Task of Reconsideration,” in another former issue of Yishu.

ɪ s ʟ a ɴ d The “real local,” the existence, of which Ford certainly has every right to question, is something that, I argue, does exist. But many of these “really” local artists might very probably, in Ford’s eyes,

8 6 “suffer from a kind of isolationist ‘island mentality’ despite valiant efforts to the contrary.”9 But with such an ‘island mentality,’ it isn’t surprising these artists were seldom exposed in the interna- tional art circuit. This is where Boris Groys’s quotation at the beginning of this article on Hong Kong’s Islander (vs. Mainlander) mentality was meant to step in. “Hong Kong, China,” no doubt, is a political reality. So is the PRD an economic reality. But with the lack of any formal division of labour and fierce internal competition, the PDR’s blazing growth has already sounded the alarm for Hong Kong that it will soon be marginalized, or overcome (or at least logistically replaced). In an age of global economy, with China joining the World Trade Organization, one simply has to accept these facts. But I agree with the paragraph posted on the Web site of Trading Places, a satellite event associated with the 2nd Guangzhou Triennale and led by scholar Matthew Turner, that stated, “commerce may have blurred or even erased residual boundaries within the Delta, but this need not be the future for culture.”10

ʜeʀe aɴd ɴow What fits even more can be found in Lee Weng Choy’s “Tomorrow’s Local Library: The Asia Art Archive in Context” in his use of the word “local” rather than “regional” in the title because, as he said, “the former . . . summons the idea of density better than the latter. The local is constantly in our face, whereas the regional is somewhere out there.”11 If Lee is cautiously optimistic, as he said, and despite the fact that our society of spectacles is constantly pursuing trends of art concerning international power relationships (one reason he mused “why is Chinese contemporary art all the rage?”), it is probably because resistance abounds everywhere. It is this Post-’7.1 local resistance politics12 that the international discourses seem to have left blank and that I would like to address further in the second part of this essay.

2 .

It has been commented, Berger wrote, that the number of artists making political work has decreased in the last few years. However, he immediately contested this comment with exhibitions like Walk Don’t Run, at 1aspace in Hong Kong. But this show, curated by Edwin Lai, who recently co-founded the concern group Cultural Front, was initiated precisely to try to combat this discouraging situation. Other exhibitions that Berger mentioned, like Power Plays, which he himself curated, included just one local artist, and Collective Space, at 1a Space, included none. One should therefore take note of the general fact that it is curators, not artists, initiating the socio-political shows. This hidden rift between local artists and curators might actually date back to when Oscar Ho was still in charge at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, around 1997.13 The difference between then and now is that the present bleak situation is really the actualization of the fear of pre-1997, or as critic Longtin suggested, the delayed true coming of 1997. Not only have the repeated reinterpretation of the Basic Laws damaged Hong Kong’s rule of law, but also a serious deterioration of freedom of speech is also gradually taking place. For example, a shocking round of consecutive firings of Hong Kong’s most popular outspoken radio hosts by a commercial radio station has taken place, with the last victim happening to be Leung Man Tao, the former art critic turned cultural and social political commentator. So when one compares the gravity of the present situation and the art circle’s limited reaction, no wonder the curators missed the fifteen-minute dress rehearsals.

Re: Wanchai—Hong Kong International Artists Workshop was reported on in Eliza Patten’s Yishu contribution,14 and the idea of fostering a closer relationship between an art project and a community settlement could be seen as another kind of a local organizer’s attempt to lead a project thematically. However, the artists’ workshop seemed to fall prey to such an agenda, with a

8 7 bit too much energy spent on working within a context of urban redevelopment. This forced context, which co-organizer Howard Chan described as “a war zone” has, one has to admit, an extra dimension, one quite different from the usual Triangle Trust’s artist workshop model, the British foundation that sponsored it, which usually took place in a rural setting. Patten notes that “the [Re: Wanchai] organizers were determined to deviate to an urban setting for their location, unable to conceive of a Hong Kong workshop that was not immersed in the city life,”15 paradoxically betraying another kind of community life. What is also interesting is how a few of the artists, some of them from various parts of the world, picked China as the base of their thematic idea because they felt they were in China (which in fact they were), whereas the organizers had wanted them to engage with a small local community on the Hong Kong island.16

In response to Walk Don’t Run and a few other exhibitions, like the one held by John Batten at his gallery, that also address the urban redevelopment plans for the gallery neighbourhood, Ford posted a question on the Web asking, “What are the problems and power discourses involved with activist driven art? Can these shows impact the social issues they are concerned with? Do these shows add power to the issue or perhaps distract from the point by staging their efforts as art? Are they truly concerned with the issues (like I feel Batten’s is) or are they facile ‘uses’ of social issues to make more work?” On the other hand, local critic Leung Po Shan, a past contributor to Yishu, felt the two shows (Walk Don’t Run and Collective Spaces) at 1a Space missed the mark in political terms.17 I personally agree with both, that good artworks were few, while the political effect was minor. As an example, designer-turned-artist (one of Hong Kong’s 51st Venice Biennale representatives) Anothermountainman’s (Stanley Wong Ping Pui), contribution to the Walk Don’t Run show, constituted a particularly problematic series of work. By digitally removing the slogans on people’s banners in photos of demonstrations, anothermountainman’s acts of removal appeared almost like a kind of powerful advertising gimmick intended to draw people’s attention, but lacked minimum political awareness.

One might say that local discussion about the relationship between art and politics has never been substantial. Pan Xing Lei’s act of defacing the Queen Victoria Statue in the last days of British colonial rule was certainly a high profile incident, and it did open a space of free discussion within the public realm. But if, as Chen Shieh-Wen argued,“the dichotomy of dominant discourses constrained the depth and openness of the discussion,” they were very much also a result of the way the performance was executed. “Too easy a target,” some remarked, and too easily we dis- missed it. To venture a bit into the present context, I see the main problem with the work was that it was too much a “cos-play.” For I only see the grand narrative of the “in-between colonizers” (Rey Chow’s phrase) illustrating a re-disclosure of history (even the Hong-Konger’s mixed sentiment, even nostalgia for British colonial rule, and no one denied it), yet not the artist’s personal/individual stance or statement from the performance act itself. What is at stake in the Hong-Konger’s mind, then, is not a “superannuated” bronze statue, as Hong Kong cultural theorist Ackbar Abbas put it, nor exaggerated artistic freedom vs. public debate, but, rather, the final British Governor Chris Patten’s last-minute delivery of democracy and its doomed fate under Chinese rule. Chen’s essay on Pan is thus a good piece of art (reception) history revisited, but I think it has not much to do with democracy, and hence all the more irrelevant to the new Post-’7.1 paradigm that is forming. Not even the patriots’ party found it politically incorrect to book all the football fields in Victoria Park (where the Queen Victoria statue still stands today) on the 1st July in 2003 to celebrate the Hong Kong Handover anniversary, coincidentally with another over five hundred thousand citizens in no mood for celebration, gathering for the oppositional demonstration.

8 8 One good indicator of the recent local art scene not having much curatorial intervention (but taste perhaps!) is the Hong Kong Art Biennial 2005, held at the Hong Kong Museum of Art. Among over one hundred works by more than eighty artists in the show, there were almost no political works. Two works were obviously “about” the Post-‘71 demonstration. Gary Mok Wai Hong’s 20030701 used a scroll form, lined up with straightforward black-and-white images of the demonstration, is like a pale record of a historical chapter. The other piece, Parade I/II (2004) by Almond Chu, a mockery of the crowd psychology of the demonstrators with digital multiplication of the identical man, also appeared in Walk Don’t Run. The best work, in my opinion, was a video Name of Wu Mei by Kongkee (Kong Khong Chang), a humble effort to serve an existing literature while visualizing the experimental narration to its fullest. The Cedric Maridet’s award-winning video Huangpu (2005) recording scenes of Shanghai Huangpu on boats, in comparison, played with weak poetics and empty aestheticization. Commentator Leung Man Tao spoke, in The Cross-over of Media Arts forum on the occasion of Zuni Iscoahedron co-founder Danny Yung’s exhibition Tree. Man (2003),18 about how Hong Kong’s arty video lacks documentary and narra- tive content in general and is more oriented towards media technology. The political content of Videotage founder Ellen Pau’s work legendarily remains obscure. Hiram To’s works, introduced in Ford’s essay and also included in Berger’s group exhibition Desire, seems much in the same vein.

Noteworthy in the Biennial was a work Teapoy (2005) by Kwan Sheung Chi, or, more exactly, by his mom. Inspired by Molly Nesbit’s article on Marcel Duchamp’s education in technical drawing in France, Kwan noted the similar background of his mother in mainland China and was success- ful in getting her “work”(drawings and furniture) into the open competition and exhibited. A similar piece, Mum after Duchamp, A Brief Chronicle of Tsang Yin-Hung’s Artistic Career (2005), was shown in Berger’s Irreality. In a city drowning in the rhetoric of creative industry (the supposedly magical cure for the future of our post-industrial city), this discreet act by Kwan is a good critical footnote that challenges the tendency towards the formalism of an art institution running a competition on creativity. Another artist, Wong Wai Yin, proposed to copy the Biennial catalogue as her work, reversing the normal order of business and providing a sense of how the local, younger generation is beginning to pick up new artistic forms of engagement when dealing with the bureaucratic institutions.

In a recent article “Art and the Political” by Frank Vigneron, the author highlighted a piece of work by Leung Chi Wo, titled CC Bureau (2004) (CC stands for Cultural Centre, the venue where the in-situ work was first exhibited), which had also been included in the Art Biennial. In this piece, that was associated with a performance, two participants read out a “deconstructed” text about the venue-hiring conditions and regulations. It is, however, a pity that the author referred to Michel Foucault, suggesting the piece is “about power,” and “about control,” rather than linking it up to the local context. Artist Tozer Pak Sheun Chuen also had a piece using similar deconstructive read- ing tactics about the Hong Kong Basic Law, in addressing the re-interpretations of it by Beijing’s authority. These two works by two artists, inevitably, remind Hong Kong people of the similar reading tactics used by an infamous local activist Leung Kwok Hung (Longhair) in his loyalty pledge to the Chinese government as Hong Kong’s newly elected legislator. Only once one views Leung Chi Wo, Tozer Pak, and Leung Kwok Hung in perspective, is one able to grasp a politically charged milieu. So it is not just the political dimension in these works of art that is significant, but also the demand for a new and daring creative approach to break the political deadlock.

While Kwan’s work dealing with his mother mentioned above has perhaps borrowed the format of Chinese artist Hai Bo’s photographic works, his Mustard Seed Garden Cigarette (2004) box set, also

8 9 included in the same Biennial, played with Chineseness in an even more obvious manner. The clouds of smoke over Victoria Harbour he drew inside the package menu reminded me of another of his works that appeared in the local newspaper Ming Pao. In it, he set fire to the phoenix design for the universal suffrage campaign (as according to the legend, a phoenix could rebirth in fire), which was designed specifically to counter the flying dragon that accompanied the government’s Asia World City campaign. As there is a neon sign of the flying dragon over the city’s skyline, where regular fireworks displays were held for tourists in front of the harbour, Kwan, here, is mocking at once Cai Guoqiang’s fireworks display and gunpowder drawings, as well as the local Hong Kong image symbol. Another work Kwan produced in the newspaper mimicked an advertisement for the The Arch, a residential block just next to the future West Kowloon Cultural (and Entertainment) District. But Kwan utilized street-sleepers’ cardboard boxes (resembling some high form of paper architecture, as Ackbar Abbas once suggested), juxtaposing the “ sky-high” price of property with a mobile form that represents poverty and necessity. These works deviated from his previous long-term subject, which was the status of the artist in the local arts circle and which quickly gained wide exposure.

Tozer Pak, who published even more works in Mingapo in even more regular manner, like Kwan, works at Fotan Studio and graduated from the Chinese University Fine Arts Department. As the only local artist included in Berger’s Power/Plays exhibition, and represented entirely by single channel videos, his work (71 Series Part III) A Present to the Central Government (2005) was displayed alongside Francis Alÿs, Lin Yilin, Zhao Bandi, Irwin, and Santiago Sierra, all contempo- rary international artists. Evoking all kinds of energetic acts that seem playful but political at the same time, Berger’s pick for his first Para/Site show, followed by another solo exhibition of works by Christian Jankowski and coming soon an exhibition of Paul Chan, reminded me of how Oscar Ho similarly began his curatorial career at the Hong Kong Arts Centre. Despite the fact that Berger seems to opt for the international up-and-coming (if not stardom), while Oscar dug into the local past and mundane everyday life, they both seemed to share the same intention of trying to loosen up the overly serious concept of art within the community and society. This curatorial direction is, of course, in a broader sense, another kind of cultural and political intervention.

Yet, when Berger wanted to show the same video work by Tozer Pak in a fringe exhibition of The Second Guangzhou Triennial: BEYOND at Xinyi International Club, Guangzhou, he finally had to withdraw it because of its political sensitivity. Similarly, the challenge that I see with Oscar Ho working in Shanghai is not whether he has betrayed Hong Kong, but whether contemporary art practice in mainland China, without a relative free speech foundation is still the same one that we have been dealing with all along. Someone might think such a social context is thus more challenging, just as the pressure Tozer Pak experienced when finishing the second part of his video in Beijing thus led him to consider anew at his relative freedom to do works in public spaces in Hong Kong.

Berger’s inclusion of local artist Wilson Shieh Ka Ho in Irreality is also noteworthy. Shieh’s Chinese medium Gongbi figurative painting has in recent years drifted away from the art spaces (the “alternative mainstream” of the peculiar local arts scene) and moved into the comfort zone of commercial gallery and museum collections. But in this show, we saw once again the juxtaposition of his work with other contemporary media, away from the dull water-and-ink medium category that tends to be a rekindled focus of the Hong Kong Museum of Art. Inclusion in Irreality gave the

9 0 content and mannerism of Shieh’s works new possibilities of dialogue. This it was thus a significant move for both the artist, as well as for Para/Site. For too long, the new water-and-ink movement in Hong Kong has been portrayed as an “East meets West” artistic achievement. And at present, Hong Kong is facing a dubious new wave of water-and-ink revival, with the Ink Society advocating for an Ink Museum in the West Kowloon Cultural (and Entertainment) District. The reorientation of the Oriental-ness for cultural tourism is undoubtedly part of the package. Yet the contemporaneity of Frog King Kwok Man Ho’s “water-and-ink installations” in its literal sense, and Law Man Lok’s criticality in taking “water-and-ink installations” literally, have both not being taken seriously enough so far.

With the heightened social and political awareness brought about by Post-’7. 1, the younger generation is experiencing something that is as critical as perhaps June 4th is to my generation. But instead of something negative happening in China that struck every person, July 1 was in the end something positive, for it fostered a new local collective identity among the Hong-Kongers living in Hong Kong, China. The works of Tozer Pak record his real daily life, his true self, his action and deeds, and his creative thoughts. They are humane yet strong conceptual pieces. They face confusing times without neglecting the individual. Hong Kong society does not leave much space for artistic cos-play to be more appealing than consumerism itself. The dislocation of Cao Fei’s cos-play and hip-hop figures, and the dog-faced human in Burberry checkered costumes, might have been an “overdose” (Berger’s phrase) of energy in her mainland context. But, as Abbas argued, “cynicism exploits confusion, other people’s and one’s own, and turns it into a fine show. But no new sense of a public can emerge from it. Cynicism is conservative, not wild at heart.”19 Hong Kong artists in the Post-’7.1 paradigm, I believe, could do something more concrete than this. To borrow a distinction from Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn, it is “to make art politically,” rather than to “make political art.”

9 1 Notes 1 Boris Groys, “Posthistorische Liebschaften,” on the Schnitt Web site, http://www.schnitt.de/themen/artikel/kolumne_groys_posthistorische_liebschaften.shtml. 2 Tobias Berger, “Hong Kong SAR: Special Art Region,” Yishu, vol. 4, no. 4 (December 2005), 9. 3 A term first used by Han Ulrich Obrist on Cao (in reference to his Hip Hop video work) in Artforum, January 2006, 180–181. http://www.caofei.com/caofei/Article/17.htm. 4 Longtin’s writings, such as his Post 97 and Hong Kong Cinema (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Critics Society, 2003), is, unfortunately, mostly written in Chinese and has seldom been translated. A piece of English writing that does carry the spirit of this paradigmatic shift is Matthew Turner’s “Building on Appearance,” in Hong Kong Four-Cast (Hong Kong: University Museum and Art Gallery, The University of Hong Kong, 2005), 6–7, which, by its title, already hints at an attempt to discard the long curse of Ackbar Abbas’s Hong Kong—Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1998) paradigmatic theory. 5 Berger, 9. 6 Hu Fang, “PRD™ as a Global Brand,” Yishu, vol. 3, no. 2, 5–6. 7 See Jaspar K. W. Lau, “The Imagining and Reality of Para/Site (VB) Collective,” PS no. 27 (2006), 82–85. 8 Norman Ford, “Do ‘(Hong Kong) Chinese’ Artists Dream of Electric Sheep?” Yishu, vol. 4, no. 4 (December 2005), 29–40. 9 Ibid., 29. 10 Ibid., 39. 11 Ibid., 39. 12 Ibid., 29. 13 Ibid., 30. Just for reference, another Hong Kong global player artist Leung Mee Ping, studied first in Paris then in Los Angeles (also included in the Re: Wanchai show), has recently exhibited in Past in Reverse: Contemporary Art of East Asia, at the San Diego Museum of Art. An article “The Chinese are coming. . . . Eastern artists are captivating the western world,” by Cate McQuaid (Globe Correspondent, February 5, 2006; http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2006/02/05/the_chinese_are_coming_/), interpreted Leung Mee Ping’s In Search of Insomnious Sheep, as a conceptual play of the paradoxical between form and emptiness, as addressing “an essential riddle of Buddhism.” At about the same time, the Hong Kong City Contemporary Dance Company’s staging of choreographer Willy Tsao’s 365 Ways of Undoing Orientalism in the United States, was described by a New York Times critic as doing “more to perpetuate” than to criticize the stereotyped perception. No wonder, Berger suggested, that every city should have its own biennial, for at least for once they could control how they themselves are presented in their own context. 14 Joan Kee, “Art, Hong Kong, and Hybridity: A Task of Reconsideration,” Yishu, vol. 2, no. 2, 90–98. 15 Norman Ford, “What Have We Done To Deserve This?” August 18, 2005, (author’s full version) http://condecon.net/con/What_Have_We.html. 16 See Trading Places, at http://tradingplacesdlabhk.blogspot.com/. 17 Lee Weng Choy, “Tomorrow’s Local Library: The Asia Art Archive in Context,” Yishu, vol. 4, no. 4 (December 2005), 21–22. 18 The outstanding temporal perspective of Lee Wing-Choy’s article also reminds me of his temporal understanding of Singapore, which I responded with the case of Hong Kong by borrowing the timeframe from the above-mentioned, 100% local, cartoon film McDull, Prince de la Bun, at an earlier Para/Site Bilateral Exchange with Singapore Substation. This has later been spelled out a bit more in full in my “Ex-change: Impossibility/Disappearance in Time/Space—A Solution Out of No Solutions, or, Not Taking ‘No’ as an Answer,” in A Matter of Ownership (Hong Kong: Para/Site, 2005), B36–53, A87–99. 19 For Tobias’s view on the working partnership between curator and artist, see Stella Fong, “Interview with the curator Tobias Berger,” PS, no.27 (2006), 70–77. 20 Eliza Patten, “Re: Wanchai—Hong Kong International Artists Workshop,” Yishu, vol. 4, no. 4 (December 2005), 24–28. 21 Ibid., 26. 22 For more details on those works, see Stephanie Cheung, “Postscript: ‘Re: Wanchai—Hong Kong International Artists’ Workshop 2005’,” PS no. 27 (2006), 45–53. 23 http://s2.phpbbforfree.com/forums/normj-about22.html 24 For Leung Po Shan’s Chinese article, see http://www.inmediahk.net/public/article?item_id=55590&group_id=59. Leung Po Shan’s Chinese article was posted in both her own blog and in “in-media.” “in-media” is a newly formed, independent Web platform (that uses almost exclusively Chinese) is designed to counter the biased or self-censoring mainstream media. Its significance was recognized mostly during the days WTO conference that was held in Hong Kong last December (2005). Many of the local art/act-ivists have their own blogs, I observed, while local artists more often still tend to build Websites. 25 Chen Shieh-wen, “When Art Clashes in the Public Sphere—Pan Xing Lei’s Strike of Freedom Knocking on the Door of Democracy in Hong Kong,” Yishu, vol. 4, no. 4 (December 2005), 49. 26 “cos-play”, which is also the title for Cao Fei’s recent 2006 solo exhibition at Para/Site, stands for a contraction of “costume” and “play,” a subculture originated from Japan in which people dressed as anime or video games characters) taking a leave from the artist’s “real” self, identity and life. 27 I wasn’t there, but I watched it on tape, thanks to Asia Art Archive’s video documentation. Also noteworthy, Zuni Iscoahedron, as an avant-garde theatre group, in recent years also developed a series of popular political satire repertories. 28 Frank Vigneron, “Art and the Political,” Hong Kong Visual Arts Yearbook 2004 (Hong Kong: Department of Fine Arts, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2005) 200-213. 29 Ackbar Abbas, “Hong Kong: Other Histories, Other Politics,” in Part 3, Cinema and the City at a Moment of Danger, ed. Esther M. K. Cheung and Chu Yiu-wai, Between Home and World—A Reader in Hong Kong Cinema (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2004), 273–96. 30 Thomas Hirschhorn, “Letter to Thierry (1994),’ Thomas Hirschhorn (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2004), 120.

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